


The Takeover (The Break's Over)

by twistedservice



Series: The Foregone [2]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - Aliens, Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Angst, Blood and Injury, Character Death, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, F/M, Found Family, M/M, Minor Character Death, Multi, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Permanent Injury, Shapeshifting, Supernatural Elements, that's better, this all sounds really bad?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-14
Updated: 2020-07-16
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:22:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 9
Words: 54,999
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24166537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twistedservice/pseuds/twistedservice
Summary: It was true what they said after all.Sometimes not knowing really was better.
Series: The Foregone [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1647778
Kudos: 1





	1. The Last Moments You Have

“You have no control over how your story begins or ends. But by now, you should know that all things have an ending. Every spark returns to darkness. Every sound returns to silence. Every flower returns to sleep with the earth. The journey of the sun and moon is predictable. But yours, is your ultimate art.”   
—Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun

**Tuesday, June 13th.  
** **Zero days.**

Pretending was not a difficult thing.

Pretending to the human race was practically second nature. It was the thing they were best at besides breathing. They woke up every morning and just did it - at school, at work, on the streets, in every moment of their life. They pretended to be someone else, pretended to be better than they were.

It was one thing to pretend to be something you were not, and another to become that thing you pretended to be.

Every-day he struggled with the balance of it.

He had enough practice, more than most people got. Most people didn’t have centuries under their belt to get used to the act, nor did they trade lives like most people would goods.

And along with that, he wasn’t  _ most people _ , either.

It was easy enough to form into something you weren’t when you knew everything you had to do. Faking it wasn’t difficult if you knew the route you had to take. There were papers you needed, pieces of identification. A sense of normalcy within yourself, believable enough to the outside world so long as no one looked too close. With everything, walking and talking and acting like a normal human was enough. These days most people had enough to look at without looking at him too.

The twenty-first century was the easiest to blend into at all. No one looked at you sideways for anything, so long as you surrounded yourself by the right people.

He had. He made sure of it. They were so busy with their own lives that they didn’t have the time to look at him too intently.

He had spent years crafting stories. He was  _ good  _ at it. That didn’t mean he was a compulsive liar, or an evil person, or anything like a sociopath. He wasn’t even running so much anymore as he was just… living.

He had lived too long believing he was bad, letting people think the same until the image had started to change. When you spent years with that image, it became less of one and more of a reality.

So maybe he wasn’t truly good  _ or  _ bad.

But he was something.

What he was doing was finally choosing to live something meaningful, for as long as he could each time until he had to pack up and start over. It took at least five years, normally, for someone to raise the first alarm. He never changed. He never got any older.

It was more than five, sometimes. That all depended on how stupid the people he surrounded himself with here.

This lot wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t going to have five years. If he even got two it would be a miracle.

His seven months this time, though, had been nothing short of almost perfect. He had a home that he actually enjoyed and relationships and things to do every-day, places to see.

That’s partly where the theater idea had come from. The whole acting shtick, the  _ real  _ one, anyway, had been a part of this life. It was one of the easiest ways to explain why a normal young adult such as himself was wandering about California searching for something more; he was fresh out of school, you see, and post-secondary just wasn’t for him. He wanted something  _ more.  _

In hindsight, he felt more than a little bad about Myra’s tendency to collect strays like it was a hobby. He had more than enough money to pay not just her, but for the building year and year again.

Someone knowing that would sour things.

Noelani had been the one who had found the place, which was his first clue-in that he had found a home. She had asked questions, everyone had, but nothing too personal. He told her the story that fit no matter what else he made up after it. His parents had come over from Japan before he was even born, and had moved back three months ago. Something random about his father’s non-existent family business always seemed to do the trick. They didn’t speak often. His parents weren’t overly emotional, involved people.

It was the opposite, really. His parents were everything, until he lost them.

That was the difficulty in being something everyone thought was bad; when they couldn’t get you, they went after everyone around you, instead.

So for now, alone, he wandered, until he landed in San Francisco and made himself a home. Noelani dug out the inaptly named Beverly Hills Playhouse from a stack of brochures the first time she had shown him around the city. She hadn’t asked much, but she had  _ listened.  _ It was always about the acting, with him.

They had classes he didn’t need. He went anyway. He still went. Noelani came with him once in a while, but it wasn’t her thing all the way through. He was alone this morning, but she had offered to pick him up after for breakfast. God knows what that situation would look like by the time she got to him; if there was even room in the car he’d be thoroughly impressed.

Everyone here was nice, too, but they weren’t the people he shared a building with. They were better. A handful of times, even, he had contemplated fessing up. They would understand his incessant need to live a halfway-normal life via lying about anything and everything.

Or they would chase him off, and he would be forced to start over. That was how many lives he had lived, now? He had lost count.

For now, they had likened to him, and he to them, and that was just the way it is. It didn’t need to change. He could live normally and they could surround him, blissfully unaware of everything he was and how much he really knew.

Myra had that look in her eye from the day she made him sign what he’s sure was a fake renter’s contract. He lived next-door to Sabre and Jay - Sabre didn’t look him in the eyes, most days, and Jay did it too often, as if overcompensating for the fact that he never quite looked the  _ same. _

Noelani had a sword in her room, for crying out-loud. He knew exactly what it was. The amount of times she had left him alone in there and she had never once tried to hide it, never once worried that he might question it. So long as they both stayed quiet about it, things progressed as normal.

They were more similar than anyone other than him realized. He had a weapon, too, but his was in hiding - the less people that knew, the better.

If he had it his way, no one would ever know. He would leave one day and the world would keep spinning.

Unfortunately for him, though, Tarquin just never got his way.

—

Predictably, he’s right on target with breakfast turning into a mess before it even begins.

His first cue was Noelani’s quick  _ leaving now!  _ text, that was sent twenty minutes ago. 

Tarquin is still sitting on the curb waiting for her, a ten minute drive away. He could have ran home faster, at this rate.

She pulls up in front of him just after the half hour mark, four out of five of the car spots filled. She honks the horn at him, as if he can’t see her. Jay gives him a weird look from the passenger seat, but he never gives Tarquin anything other than that.

Before he’s even up on his feet he witnesses the silent war that happens in the back-seat - Topher is closest to him, on one side, and Sabre is on the other, nose buried in a book and evidently refusing to come out. By the time he opens the door Topher has obviously given up. He gives a lengthy sigh and scoots into the middle to allow Tarquin entry.

“Sorry,” Noelani says, turning to give him a smile. “How was it?”

“Good.”

She nods. She’s just satisfied she can take credit for sending him, after all.

“How’s that girl that has a thing for you?” Jay asks. “What’s her name? Rochelle?”

“Roxy,” he corrects. “And she doesn’t have a thing for me.”

“She totally does.”

“At least someone actually likes him,” Topher quips. Tarquin devotes his attention to the window whilst wondering how quickly it will take for the two of them to come to light-hearted blows. Sabre cowers further into the door.

He doesn’t think Roxy has a thing for him, really. There’s this other thing called friendship, too, and Jay is only hoping it’s more than that so that the pool of people who could potentially steal Noelani from him grows smaller, as if there’s a pool at all or someone that even could to begin with. It’s all fun and games in here, he thinks.

He hopes. It’s better that way.

Jay and Topher are still bickering when they pull up to the restaurant, a place they’ve been to a dozen times but never with five people. They’re still doing it just inside the doorway, too, even though Jay has slung an arm over Sabre’s reluctant shoulder and Topher is outright ignoring the hostess giving them an expectant look.

Noelani is practiced at shoving them inside to make any sort of progress. She does it at the door and again at the table, too, to pin them down in opposite corners away from one another with Sabre smack-dab between them so something will be less likely to occur.

It also means that he and Noelani wind up sitting next to each other, alone on the other side of the table, and he’s not blind enough to miss Jay’s entirely unenthused look.

He thinks you’d  _ have  _ to be blind to miss it.

This is a normal thing for them, though. It almost never winds up the way you expect it regardless of their plans, but it’s usually better. So long as everyone manages to behave over the breakfast table and keep their menus to themselves, nothing too bad can happen.

This is one of the safest places to be, surrounding himself with things more obvious than himself, even if they try desperately to conceal it. Some more than others, clearly - Jay is still just as loud now as he was in the car, managing to drown out practically all of the surrounding noise in the restaurant despite the volume of it. How Jay wrangles such noise is still an absolute mystery. Tarquin doesn’t think he’s ever made that much noise in his entire life, and it’s not like he’s introverted to begin with.

Sabre is, though, terribly so, and he looks like he wants to be absorbed by the booth seat more and more with every passing minute.

Jay never helps that situation.

“Sabre,” he keeps saying, over and over. He gets more thoroughly ignored every time. “Sabre, you have to talk to me.”

“Don’t I talk to you enough at home?”

Those are the first words Tarquin’s heard him utter since he got in the car. So no, he doesn’t think so. “You do,” Jay insists. Color him surprised. “But no one believes that you do because you never talk to me in public.”

“I think you talk enough in public for the both of us.”

“True,” Jay agrees, and he returns to sipping at coffee that he absolutely does not need.

It’s good, though. The familiarity is comforting, and he’s getting used to it in a way that he knows he shouldn’t. Everything ends. This will too, one day, in a time shorter than most.

For now he lets himself enjoy it, though. Too many cups of coffee and too much noise and the same breakfast decisions that they make every single time, poring over the menu as if they’re going to make a different one.

These moments aren’t so easily interrupted, usually. This time it comes in the form of his phone going off in his back pocket, to the point where he can no longer ignore it even over Jay’s endless chatter.

And it’s not that Percy  _ doesn’t  _ usually talk to him, he’s just surprised to see his name popping up.

He answers with a simple, “Hello?” waving a hand at Jay in an attempt to quiet him. It doesn’t work. Tarquin gets up from the table with a single screech of the chair and rounds to Noelani’s other side, as far away as he can get without leaving entirely.

“Are you not at home?” Percy asks quickly.

“No. Why?”

There’s a long, stilted sigh. “No reason. It’s fine.”

“Seriously, why?” he presses. There are a million reasons that could be at the heart of it, but Tarquin already feels like he knows something.

“I want to go down to the police station again. I was just wondering if…”

Percy is not a hesitant person. He’s hesitating, now. Until this point, there’s never been this much desperation.

The story is that something happened to Nic because he was  _ human _ , everyone has been loathe to involve him because they think that if something else happens, he’s next. He’s the only other human they’ve got.

Little do they know.

Humans are good assets, though. More likely to be able to get help, more likely to be listened to in the matter of serious cases. If Percy is asking him to come along because he’s finally reached a point where he’s not getting anything.

Tarquin might as well try.

“I’ll come with you,” he agrees. “I’m just out at breakfast. After?”

“Sure. I can come get you.”

“No, it’s fine. Noelani can drive me,” he says, looking to her for confirmation. She nods. “Same one as usual?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. See you soon.”

Percy’s already hung up before he gets the last word out, which is for the best, because now Tarquin can’t say anything foolish like  _ don’t worry  _ or  _ stop stressing so much.  _ That’s all Percy’s done for the past three months. Telling him to do otherwise would be a bad move.

When he sits back down it’s easy to see how much the mood has already sombred, without him even explaining the gist of it. They must be able to put two and two together. On the topic of Nic, with three months having passed, it’s hard to.

Even Jay is silent, for once, lips pursed as if he wants to say something but can’t come up with anything good.

That would be a first.

“He’s probably dead,” Topher says finally, without warning.

“Toph,” Noelani chastises, sounding more like a mother than a sibling.

“I’m just saying what everyone is already thinking,” he points out. “You think it too, Lani. What chance is there that he’s still alive after three months?”

Slim to none. Tarquin doesn’t know the statistics and doesn’t want to. What he does know, confidently, is that there are things crawling all over this city, and a handful of them are bloodthirsty. For all they know Nic didn’t even go down that way. It could have been easy, simplistic human violence. He could be gone the way Tarquin will be in a few years, never to be seen again.

He’s still going to the police station with Percy, though. Regardless of what happened, Percy needs an answer. At this point, they all do.

Someone is going to drop into an early grave if they don’t. Worrying will kill you faster than whatever got Nic did.

Tarquin really does think he’s dead, just like Topher said.

There’s no way he can say that now.

—

Breakfast is a hurried affair, for once, but no one complains. No one has a right to.

They drop him off at the police station and Noelani leaves him there with a worried look in her eyes. It would be more concerning if she didn’t almost always look like that.

It takes him a full lap to find Percy. Turns out he just went the wrong way. He’s sitting on a bench next to the fenced in parking lot Tarquin doesn’t think he’s supposed to be loitering near, knee bouncing up and down ceaselessly. It’s shaking his whole body.

Percy looks up at him, not even bothering to shield his eyes from the sun. “How was breakfast.”

“Good,” he replies, watching him continuously shake. “When was the last time you ate?”

“Lunch.”

He blinks. “It’s nine in the morning.”

“Yesterday.”

Tarquin sighs. “Let’s go. You’re going to get food after this.”

“You can’t make me,” Percy mutters under his breath, clear as day. Tarquin can absolutely make him, and he doesn’t have to know that. He’s going to eat whether he likes it or not. He’s not going to fall into his aforementioned early grave because of  _ starvation. _

The first officer inside the doors gives them a dirty look the second they walk in. Percy gives him one right back.

He can already tell that this is going to end well.

He can only imagine what Percy gets up to on these visits considering he never makes any progress and never has any news to report, and Tarquin realizes why almost immediately. He’s too hostile. He has every right to be, but that was never going to fly in this setting. They dismiss him for two reasons: one, because he’s not human, and two, because he’s not in the least bit cooperative.

He marches right up to the front counter and leans too close into the personal space of the man behind it. “Is Detective Brassard in today?”

“No. Consider calling ahead.”

“I’ve tried. No one gives me any answers.”

“Some advice, kid,” the Officer says. “Let us do our jobs in peace.

“Don’t call me— when is he going to be in, exactly?” Percy is making an attempt at a threshold on his anger, but barely. It’s still visible and would be from a mile away.

“Right, not a kid, because you came crawling out of the seelie court. What were you doing messing around with a human, anyway?”

Percy gives Tarquin a barely disguised look of panic; it’s not because he’s worried about a cop knowing, it’s because he’s worried about Tarquin. As if he didn’t figure it out almost five months ago anyway. Does he honestly look that stupid?

It’s a good cover, anyhow.

Tarquin keeps his face as neutral as possible, not giving him a large reaction either way. Percy finally looks back - the worried knit to his face has reformed back into irritation and anger once again.

“I’m  _ going  _ to mess with a human in a second if you don’t—”

Tarquin tunes out whatever the rest of that unfortunate sentence is going to be, and bee-lines it for the next person he sees, a woman with concerningly large biceps seated behind the desk at the right wall. She’s on the phone when he stops in front of her, so he tucks his hands behind his back and waits, looking ever the picture of patience. He’s proved something, at least. This far away, the woman can’t hear whatever profanity Percy is no doubt spewing at her fellow officer somewhere behind him.

She hangs up the phone. He smiles. “Hello,” he says, aiming for pleasant and just about making it there. “Do you know when Detective Brassard is going to be in next?”

“I’m not of the authority to be giving out that information.”

Right. Well it wasn’t an outright no, at least. “Does he have a card I could take, then? A personal phone number?”

She gives him a look, or perhaps she’s eyeballing Percy behind him. She nods, stands up, taking a wide glance around the room that apparently finds nothing at all wrong with the situation.

He’s finally found the blind one of today.

When she returns he takes the card from her outstretched hand. “Thank-you,” he tells her, offering another smile. She still doesn’t look the least bit impressed, but at least she hasn’t intervened in any of the weirder happenings of this building today.

Tarquin takes a photo of the card before he heads back - just a name, phone number, and the same address that they’re standing in now, but it’s something. Maybe Percy can do something, or perhaps he can at a later date. It seems they’re already more willing to listen to him so long as he maintains a human charade whilst at it.

Tarquin grabs Percy by the shoulder. “We’re leaving,” he announces. “Thanks again!”

The heckled Officer looks more thankful than anything, but gives him a curt nod.

Hopefully someone here will remember that he tried. It could get him somewhere, or Percy, or anyone. All they need is one breakthrough.

And he needs to make Percy eat, evidently, but that’s another battle entirely.

—

Tarquin is good at working through things.

He succeeds in getting Percy through a drive-thru. So what if he threatens to take the wheel from him and crash the car if he disobeys. He returns him home with a bag of phone and a Detective’s business card in his hand and ensures that he actually  _ stays  _ rather than going out to harass whoever else he finds to help him with his business.

It’s still early, but he heads back home himself and drops his belongings on the coffee table before he eases open the window in his bedroom to slip out onto the fire escape. He has no door - that belongs to Sabre and Jay next door, but it’s easy enough to clamber out this way. He could always go up to the roof if he wanted.

There’s a security in the fire escape, though, in wandering past their aforementioned door and up the last set of stairs until he reaches the last landing, that exists despite all the creaking underfoot. You could fall up on the roof. He wouldn’t, at least, but someone could. There was something different, however, about dangling his legs through the rusted metal slats and just allowing himself to breathe. Everything was a bit clearer up here. It would do everyone some good to try it.

He knew he wasn’t the only person to come up here, but Tarquin never felt the inclination to ruin someone else’s time. People didn’t come up here looking for company; they’d go the opposite way, if that was the case. There were so many years of his spent hiding, sticking closer to the shadows, that he knows who and what to stay away from.

Tarquin likes to think that he’s grown back into what he was  _ before _ , the carefree kid that only existed to live and who had yet to realize what horrors he could so easily become. He still worried, but so did everyone.

He couldn’t live his whole life worrying. It was better, instead, to clear his head like he was doing now, to sort out all of the negative thoughts instead of letting them pick at him until he was raw inside and out.

He had felt that way for long enough.

The fire escape isn’t usually a place he sits long. It’s uncomfortable, for one, and nine times out of ten he’s got something better to do. This time the sun keeps him there, the warmth over-riding the metal digging grooves into his underside.

Down the stairs the sliding door inches open, and then the metal creaks. There’s no immediate voice. It’s not Jay.

Tarquin had been sitting there with his eyes closed for quite some time now, and despite knowing the truth is still shocked to see Sabre when he opens them, almost silent as he makes it to the landing at Tarquin’s side. He sits down, cross-legged. There’s no dropping his legs over the edge like Tarquin has, as if uncomfortable with the thought of falling. He has no more reason to be afraid of that than Tarquin does.

“Jay wanted to know how it went at the station,” Sabre says eventually, voice a soothing murmur. It helps solidify the comfort some.

Tarquin looks back down a floor, expecting to see Jay’s curious face and ogling eyes pressed up against the glass, watching them expectantly. He’s not there. “Why didn’t Jay come up and ask me himself?”

“He wanted to. I wouldn’t let him. You didn’t look like you wanted to be disturbed.”

And Sabre wouldn’t know what the word  _ disturb  _ meant if it came up and smacked him right in the face, and nothing would have the heart to do it to him like that. He’s so unobtrusive, so worryingly quiet. Tarquin thinks he could die trying to obtain that level of serenity.

It doesn’t look like serenity, though. Sabre always looks worried about something, emotions constantly ebbing and shifting as he focuses on some new problem or other, desperate to figure out every single little detail about it. It’s a tenseness to his jaw, a furrow between his eyebrows, a repeated work to his throat as he breathes through it.

He’s definitely not at peace. Tarquin knows what that feels like. It looks more like he’s been swimming towards peace for years only to be constantly dragged away by the current.

“After Percy I wasn’t sure you could handle any more talking,” Sabre continues eventually.

Tarquin smiles. “Was that a joke?”

“Not if Percy asks if it was.”

He knows what makes everyone tick. He  _ watches.  _ Sabre probably knows more about people in this building than just about anyone else, and he lives with the nosiest of them.

“The Detective wasn’t there,” Tarquin offers. “I got a card. Percy’s going to try and get into contact with him directly, or I might try if that doesn’t work.”

“It won’t.”

“I figured.”

“That’s good of you to help, though.”

“He needs closure,” Tarquin says. That may not be what Percy ultimately wants, and it’s going to be undoubtedly ugly when he does, but then everything can start over. Go back to even a semblance of what it was before.

It’s harsh, but it’s the truth. Tarquin has seen enough people come and go, live and die, to know that letting go is impossible unless you have the right answers to do so. Even with them it took him years to let go of his parents, properly.

“So you think he’s dead too, then,” Sabre points out.

“Does it matter what I think?” Tarquin counters. With this group, it usually doesn’t, and it’s unlikely it ever will.

“You’re allowed to have an opinion.”

“I believe we  _ all  _ think he’s dead and we’re just not willing to say it, especially to Percy, who almost definitely thinks the same thing. He’s just not going to believe it until he sees a body - whatever’s left of it by now, anyway.”

It seems cruel, but everything sort of is nowadays unless you make it the opposite. Nic is gone, and even getting him back, as much of a miracle as that would be, would not magically fix this. Nothing is. To the outside world, creatures such as themselves are not fixable things.

“What do you think?” Tarquin asks. Although he loathes thinking about it, turning it back on someone else is at least slightly better.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“If my opinion matters, so does yours.”

“It doesn’t,” he murmurs. “Besides, it just makes everything worse.”

“What does?”

“Knowing.”

“And what do you  _ know _ ?” Tarquin asks slowly. “Things that nobody else does?”

“You know things too. You’re not stupid.”

He swallows. “I don’t know anything.”

“Right.” Sabre nods, clearly unconvinced. “Keep it that way. Like I said, knowing things is worse than being oblivious, here. Trust me.”

They’re no longer talking about the same things here, if they ever were to begin with. Tarquin thinks he would be better off not knowing what path Sabre ventured down without his permission. At least before he  _ knew  _ they were talking about Percy.

Sabre drags his knees up to his chest, chin propped up on them. He swallows, one last time that Tarquin can see without straining his eyes before he no longer has a clear view.

Still thinking. He always is. Tarquin thinks he just got more words out of him than possibly anyone has ever heard, save for Jay, but can’t even begin to wrap his brain around the vast majority of them. Perhaps that’s why he keeps his words to himself; they only make things more confusing, and clearly confuse him even more alongside it.

Sabre doesn’t leave for a bit; the company is strange, but not bad, and gradually the longer he sits the less the thoughts weigh on his mind. It’s easy to fixate on the sun, the air, the breeze that could take him away if only he would let it.

One day. It’s always down to that one day.

Jay eventually opens the sliding door, though, calling out to them without racing up here for once, and Sabre climbs to his feet before he’s even finished the first of his sentences.

He looks down at Tarquin before he descends. “Be careful up here.”

Tarquin nods. Sabre looks at him for too long.

He knows things that nobody else does, and he knows confidently that neither of them are the falling type.

Tarquin knows that the sensible, human thing to do would be to return to his apartment, or even to the ground. Solid earth is more comforting. There are a million things he could do down there, normal things that fit into every-day life, the one he’s successfully built for himself once again. It’s always hard to return to such things despite their safety when the opposite has been the thing to protect him time and time again.

The sky is different now, though. He doesn’t know what about it shifts so suddenly. It’s the softest of blues, the clouds fuzzy around the edges, and for a moment it moves as if made of water, a ripple of the ocean transferred to the sky.

He’s seen it for so long, now, the movements and changes, and yet he’s never seen anything like this.

Something moves across it, a ball of white so blinding that he can hardly trace it with his eye, growing bigger with every passing second as it leaves the sky and seems to descend towards the city.

It looks like a falling star, an asteroid. A second before it disappears beyond the highest of downtown’s buildings it’s as if it transforms even further into a thousand colors.

He hardly feels the tremor. The fire escape’s railings shake and then still.

When Tarquin looks up again, there are dozens more in the sky. 

They’re everywhere. Spread so wide and moving so fast that Tarquin can’t even begin to count them before the lowest ones begin disappearing. There’s one moving towards him, growing larger and larger as it encroaches on the building. It appears far above his head as it goes sailing over him - it plummets down a heartbeat later only a few blocks down the road.

This time, everything shakes for real, and when he stands up he nearly tips over the top railing. The road splits in two when it hits; car alarms start blaring, wires spark as the nearest telephone pole threatens to tip over. In every direction there are people running, screaming, things left abandoned on the sidewalks in their haste to get away.

There’s so much smoke and a following burst of fire that he can’t even make it out. There’s no telling what it is. Tarquin has a sinking, awful feeling in his gut regardless.

They’re words that everyone’s always said. Words that everyone thought they were ready for, untrue and far-away, never to be properly confronted.

Except it’s here, now. He’s looking at it.

Instead of seeking shelter he climbs up the last of the stairs until he can haul himself up onto the rooftop. There’s more above him now, sailing further away. Everything is shaking all around him, the scent of smoke in the air beginning to linger heavy in his lungs.

No one was ever really ready for this.

He turns, again. There’s another like the one before, growing larger, pointed towards where he stands like the end of an arrow, unwavering. The light grows to a point where it blots out everything else. For a long, awful moment, it’s all he can see.

It’s too close.

He thinks he might feel something. A searing heat, enough to scorch in a single second, all the hairs on the back of his neck up as high as they can go.

The pain came, then. A lot of it. More than he’s felt in a very long time. It almost, for a false second, feels like an old friend finally returning home.

It’s pain again, without warning. Too much of it.

It’s pain, and then nothing at all.


	2. The Best Kept Secrets

**Wednesday, June 14th.  
** **The day after.**

Emmi is considering posting a public bulletin.

The bulletin would say, “TO ALL THOSE THAT SLEPT: CONGRATS, AND ALSO FUCK YOU”. Apt, and to the point. It’s something she truly feels.

It also lumps in Arwen with the rest of them, and she doesn’t feel quite comfortable doing that when she manages to look so peaceful and yet put together sleeping next to her, the same way she always does. It’s a truly enviable trait to have. That girl sleeps like the dead. She would even if that exact thing was coming for her.

At first it was just the stress of the previous day coming back to her when Emmi had finally turned in for the night. Arwen had already been asleep, the bed warmed up appropriately. You would think that would have helped her calm and quiet, letting sleep fix everything that happened, but it had, in fact, been the exact opposite.

It was just before seven, now. Emmi thinks she had totaled maybe twenty minutes of sleep in the past five hours.

No one would blame her. If she imagined it, she could see the vast majority of the city up in the same way, unable to close their eyes until they finally dragged shut on their own, unable to be controlled. Everyone was scared, wondering. Emmi only had a handful of things to be scared of these days, and this was one of them.

She wanted to be one of the people that wasn’t scared, whoever they were and wherever they resided. She desperately wanted what they had.

It was clear she wasn’t going to get it that simply. Not until this was all over.

What was  _ this _ , though? The news was reporting things, but what did the news really know? This was unprecedented. They had nothing to compare it to.

She knew what everyone was saying, but, well… Emmi found out quite quickly that the word  _ aliens  _ didn’t sit well in her gut.

Who would have thought?

That’s what everyone was saying, anyway. It didn’t mean it was true. Was it likely? Sure. Things had come falling from the sky - fifty-seven things, if the reports were to be believed. Whatever those fifty-seven things were, though, they were all gone. Some had clearly fled. There was grainy, helicopter-shot footage of things running from the scenes of the crime, faster than what seemed possible.

Some were just  _ gone  _ though. One had landed right behind the building only to have nothing in it.

Emmi thinks there was something in it, once upon a time. They were just too slow to catch it. Their piece of the puzzle was missing. To be honest, she’s not sure she wants it found. Better to have a hole in the puzzle than to fill it in and come to find out it’s nothing that you wanted to see.

She had lived a few centuries, now, running and hiding but always knowing what was coming for her.

Now she had no idea.

She shifts, again, accidentally pulling aside the curtains just behind their heads. A sliver of light spills in over their shoulders.

Without warning, Arwen lifts a hand up and flattens it over her stomach, applying just enough pressure that she goes still.

“Sorry,” she murmurs. She’s been moving all night long; it’s a miracle that much time passed before she woke her.

“What are you doing?”

“Not sleeping.”

“I can see that,” Arwen says, despite her eyes not even being open. The evenness to her voice would have Emmi believing it anyway if she didn’t know any better by now. “Why?”

“More like why  _ are  _ you sleeping?” Emmi asks. “How are you doing this?”

“Doing what?”

“Sleeping!”

“Pretty normal thing to do,” Arwen points out. She retracts her hand and the warmth it brought for the brief period it was there, curling back up at Emmi’s side. She looks as if nothing happened, as if nothing bothers her.

Emmi has spent enough time around her to know that it’s almost the truth, but not quite.

Despite her constant wiggling about, it looks as if Arwen is at least attempting to go back to sleep. Emmi feels more than compelled to let her.

That doesn’t mean she can, though. “What if it’s like  _ Alien vs Predator _ and we’re all going to die?”

“Everyone died in those movies?”

“Well, no.”

“Then we’ll be  _ fine _ ,” Arwen insists. “They could also be like, E.T. He was pretty chill.”

“I’ve never seen E.T.”

“What the fuck is wrong with you?”

So many things, really. More than even Arwen knows. In fact, if Emmi was ordered to list them off, she thinks it would include more things that no one knew, not even the people closest to her.

Whatever happened yesterday, the truth of it is still out there. Someone’s keeping secrets.

Emmi knows all about that.

There are plenty of people who would disagree, but secrets, as of the last century or so, have kept her safe. If not her, the people she chooses to surround herself with. Any of her secrets won’t hurt them so long as they don’t get out. She thinks the same about yesterday, to be frank. If most of it says hidden, she wouldn’t be surprised.

That may just be for the best.

“Just try and sleep a little,” Arwen insists, voice still tired. “We’ll relax today, and think about it tomorrow.”

Tomorrow seems so far away, though. She’ll have so many hours to think about it, too many, and there’s no way any distraction will be sufficient enough. Arwen can try. Everyone can try. That doesn’t mean it will work. That’s a lesson Emmi has learned time and time again.

At least someone will try, though. She has people here, and they don’t know everything, but they’re close and they’re trying and she won’t complain about it.

She can’t do this to Arwen forever, but she doesn’t know how to do anything else. She’s in too deep. She’s stayed for too long. At the end of the day they’re just two women who get people killed, accidentally or not, and maybe they weren’t meant to be together in the thick of things.

Right here, right now, though, is safety, where she’s supposed to be and where she hopes to remain for some time to come. Maybe it’s not dying that worries her, really. If she was afraid of that the anxiety would have chased her underground a long time ago.

She just doesn’t want to lose  _ this.  _ So whatever yesterday was, whatever it turns out to be, it’s got another thing coming to it if it thinks she’s going down that easy.

They could only try, and they damn well wouldn’t succeed.

Not even close.

—

Emmi really does try, the whole day.

In fact, Arwen won’t even let her turn on the news, or leave the apartment to investigate, and deletes every message she tries to send to anyone else in the chat about what could be going on.

You’d think it helps her sleep that night.

It doesn’t. It just makes her get up even earlier the next morning, before anyone has even stirred in the apartment. She considers heading downstairs to check out whatever monstrosity landed in their backyard, wondering if it’s changed since the first day, but Jupiter rouses before she can talk herself into it. After that, Emmi doesn’t feel like she can. Jupiter’s not the type to tag along for something like that, not unless Mal dragged them to it against their will.

They’re both quiet so early in the morning, but Jupiter turning the news on makes them both even quieter. Emmi can only shift through the same pile of mail so many times over before something has to break.

“Do you think they’re telling the truth?” Jupiter wonders, voice soft. Not nearly enough to wake anybody up; almost not loud enough for Emmi to hear.

“Sorry?”

“The government says the Collection Agency rounded all fifty-seven of those things up and has them, whatever they are.”

Because the fucking government is to be believed these days, the same one who doesn’t give a shit about most of them anyway. And fuck the Collection Agency, while they’re at it. They’re made up of more monsters than most people she knows.

There’s a reason she’s short one forearm and hand.

“I hope so,” she says, but she knows it’s impossible, and it’s an ugly lie regardless. Nothing deserves whatever the Agency would inflict on them, especially not things that just so happened to be here. Nobody even knows what they are, if they’re bad or good.

“Don’t worry about it,” Emmi continues. It wasn’t worth it for someone like Jupiter to let it weigh on their mind - they worried enough as is.

Emmi was doing all of the worrying, for now.

She certainly wasn’t about to stand here and watch the news, however. There was a limit on how much she could handle seeing in one day, especially so early. She’d rather debate and run circles around options that may or may not even exist.

She does just that, then. She takes her half-eaten granola bar into the hall, leaving a vaguely distressed Jupiter in the center of the couch.

It’s a hit or miss looking for Meris this early; this time, when Emmi knocks, she gets no response, and not even Mel comes running to welcome her. 

The other option is more practiced. Emmi already has plenty of experience breaking and entering when it comes to Soran, most typically when Myra couldn’t get a hold of him. It’s like the lock gives way before she even tries, the door swinging open to reveal a grand total of nothing and no one.

His room isn’t quite the same. Emmi has never had luck with the lock here, but this time doesn’t need it. When she tries the door it opens easily.

Finding them both firmly asleep is the least surprising thing from the last few days. She reaches for the first thing she can see, a rolled up pair of socks half stuck out of the dresser, and pitches it at them. It bounces off the center of Icarus’ back and somewhere into the blankets. He mumbles something, rolling over to face her with an arm draped over his face. Soran doesn’t so much as flinch. And here she thought he was a light sleeper, always on his toes.  _ Someone’s  _ letting their guard down just a little bit.

She can relate to that on a level she wishes she couldn’t.

“What?” Icarus yawns, closing his eyes as soon as he figures out what, or who, it is he’s looking at.

“Can we talk?”

“In two hours,” he agrees, too fast, and then rolls back over, until he’s no longer even using the pillow that qualifies as his.

“No,” she demands. “Now.”

“ _ Why _ ?” he complains, voice muffled in the blankets.

“I seem to be the only one seriously freaked out about this whole falling from the sky doomsday possible alien thing, and—”

The little snicker that she hears from the tangle of blankets stops her dead in her tracks. It didn’t  _ sound  _ like Icarus, which means Soran is more awake than she previously thought.

“What are you laughing about?” she demands to know, striding forward. The second she reaches for him, whatever ankle she presumably latches onto first, he wraps a hand around the edge of the bed-frame and holds on for dear life. She gives him a firm shake. “Hey. You. Why the laughter?”

It takes him a minute to sit up and escape the nest of blankets it seems they’ve created. She shakes his leg again halfway through. This feels a lot like a blackmail opportunity. Walking in on them like this alone warranted a picture that she missed out on taking, and now he’s staring at her, eyes still tired, hair sticking up in places it shouldn’t.

She didn’t even bring her fucking phone.

“Do you have any advice on how you maintain such eerie calmness while the world is imploding around you?” she asks.

“Depends.” Soran shrugs. “Do you want me to help you, or do you want an answer?”

“An answer to what?”

He smiles. It turns into something more than that, a grin that looks downright evil the longer she looks at it. “Go look in the bathroom.”

She stares. Squeezes his ankle hard enough that hopes it hurts, because he might just deserve it. “Why?”

Soran shrugs again, flopping back down into bed as if he plans on never getting out. Something about his face looks too smug for her to feel comfortable whatsoever listening.

And she still does.

The bathroom door is closed. It hadn’t even struck her before that it was an odd thing. Emmi doesn’t allow any time for second guessing before she throws the door open.

The first thing that she notices, stupidly, is the lamp that’s normally on the lone side table in the living room balanced precariously on top of the toilet, as if it belongs there. The light emitting from it is soft and dim, a setting she’s never seen before, providing just enough light that she can make out all the harsh edges in the room.

The second thing she notices is the person.

Emmi makes a very loud, undignified noise, but it’s nothing compared to that of whatever escapes the mouth of the other person, a shrill squeak that sounds almost like a mouse. She nearly hits herself with the door, her white-knuckled grip around the handle sending it crashing into the opposite wall so hard it nearly bounces back into her.

And then, predictably, she hears Soran laughing.

It’s a faraway noise. There’s a person in his bathroom, in his fucking  _ bathtub  _ to be precise. It looks like a person. It’s breathing like one.

Emmi is choosing not to believe it really is one.

“Soran!” she yells. His cackling grows louder in volume.

She’s not sure she’s ever hated a person so much in her life.

On top of that, she can’t even move. She’s fixated, rooted to the spot. The not-person in Soran’s bathtub of all places has shrunken away from her with nowhere to go, staring upward with eyes so wide Emmi wouldn’t be surprised to see them fall out.

Just about everything else has evidently surprised her.

“What the fuck?” she breathes, staring at it. It’s an it. You won’t convince Emmi otherwise. Small as can be, folded in on itself, every image of a normal, teenage-aged human being, except…

Except it’s not normal. Emmi leans closer, and flicks the overhead light on. They both flinch. It’s eyes are not just one color. They look blue, when she stares, but there’s an odd shift around the edges, faint purple and green like the twilight hours, like the northern lights. Brighter than they have any right to be.

Like the sky, really.

This isn’t happening.

Soran appears in the doorway so suddenly that she jumps again, and this time nearly hits him with the door instead.

“C’mon,” he says. “Don’t scare her. You’re scaring her.”

“I’m  _ what _ ?” she asks wildly. “What the hell is it?”

“I mean, you’re the one that said the word al—”

“No,” she interrupts. “No, no no no. No.”

They both stare at each other. The thing in the bathtub stares at the both of them.

“But… yeah,” Soran says eventually. Emmi sucks in a breath so fast she gets dizzy. She’s not fortunate enough to pass out and crack her head open on the floor, stopping herself from seeing all of this downright madness.

That’s what this is. It’s madness. It’s not real.

“We were the first ones down there after it happened,” Soran explains. “First ones to see the direct aftermath, and she was it.”

“So you… kidnapped it?”

“No. She asked _us_ to take her, thank you very much.”

Emmi turns around again. The thing that absolutely does not look like an alien almost shies away again, but holds onto the edge of the tub to keep itself still.

So much for anything the government says. She  _ knew it _ . There was no way they had rounded up all of them, and if there was one here, chances are there were dozens more crawling about the city uncontained. If they all looked as frightened as this one it quelled some of Emmi’s fears, but they couldn’t  _ all  _ be that way.

Could they?

“So why is it in the bathtub?” Emmi asks. There’s a pillow and blanket thrown in there, too, but both have been shoved all the way to its feet, underneath the tap.

“She wouldn’t sleep on the couch,” Soran replies. “Believe me, I tried. I don’t think she’s used to it.”

“I wonder why,” she says weakly. Emmi doesn’t want to, but she finally crouches down, putting them on eye level. She doesn’t get an inch closer to the tub - she’s closer to running out the door than anything else. It’s just so worryingly  _ human.  _ If it weren’t for the eyes Emmi would believe it was without asking a single question.

“Does it speak English?”

“She does now.”

“What does that mean?”

“She didn’t when she got down here, but she heard us talking, and now she does. Something about enhanced intelligence. Her brain turned around all the words she heard us speak and gave her an entire language back.”

“That’s not possible.”

“It is, actually. I think her skeleton’s hollow, too. She’s light as shit, and super fast. For all we know she can fly. She won’t tell me. She hasn’t even had anything to eat or drink since she got here.”

So she’s completely self-sustaining, knows everything she shouldn’t,  _ and  _ just happened to drop out of the sky practically right on top of them?

Great.

Emmi braces herself for something awful when she shifts forward almost to the edge of the tub, but nothing actually happens. Part of her wants to feel safe.

“Do you have a name?” she asks. It’s stupid. Everyone has one. Everyone has  _ something _ . It means Emmi is willing to try and live with the details, to gain little pieces of information that bring her closer than she’d like.

“Isperia.” It’s voice is small, fragile, distinctively a  _ she  _ and so quiet Emmi begins to feel just a little bit bad.

Just a little.

“That’s a mouthful,” she manages. Isperia nods. Soran does, too. Having finally appeared, Icarus does not nod at all; his chin is tucked over Soran’s shoulder and his eyes are half-closed, like he wasn’t ready for this so early in the morning.

Neither was Emmi, to be frank.

The knock on the door pulls her out of it, halfway. Isperia shrinks back once again,as if she’s capable of liquefaction and is going to disappear down the drain. Emmi wouldn’t even be shocked.

“I’ve got it,” Icarus mumbles, stepping back. Emmi launches to her feet, grabbing him by the shoulder.

“No you don’t,” she quickly insists. “Let me out. I need a break.”

She really does. Luckily Icarus doesn’t fight back, or even attempt to follow her. Emmi pulls open the front door with a flourish as the two idiots behind her take a few neat steps into the living room, pulling all the suspicion from the hallway with them.

Or at least she hopes that’s what it does.

“Oh,” Noelani says, fist poised as if ready to knock again. “Hey, Emmi.”

“What’s up?”

“Just wondering… I know it’s a bit of a long-shot, but is Tarquin here?”

“Why would Tarquin be here?” she questions. The slight frown that had already been formed on Noelani’s face deepened further.

“I didn’t think he would be,” she sighs. “This is just the last place I could check.”

“You can’t find him?”

“No one’s seen him since Tuesday morning,” she admits. “We went out for breakfast, and then he went with Percy to the police station. Sabre said he saw him just before… you know.”

Yeah, Emmi knows alright. Emmi definitely fucking knows.

“And he’s not home?” Emmi clarifies.

“I tried yesterday. No answer. I’ve messaged him like a dozen times but haven’t gotten one that way either. I was just going to check with everyone else and then head upstairs - he gave me a key, and I don’t know what else to do.”

“Did we really manage to lose both of our humans within three months?” Soran asks. Emmi turns to give him a dirty look. She’s not surprised at the lack of anything apologetic on his face.

“Shut up,” she insists. “I’ll go with you,” she says to Noelani, who takes that clearly as an open invitation to leave right away.

Emmi waits until she’s a few paces down the hall. “I’m coming right back,” she hisses.

“Stop worrying.”

“No.”

“She’s a nice one, I think,” Soran says plainly. “You know, like E.T.”

“God do I wish that everyone would stop bringing up fucking  _ E.T _ ,” she mutters.

“I only said it once!”

Emmi looks down the hall; Noelani is waiting for her at the stairs, watching curiously. She leans further in one last time. “I’m coming back,” she repeats under her breath. Soran doesn’t quite glower, but he doesn’t look impressed either way.

“Please don’t,” he says, and then slams the door in her face.

She definitely is.

—

Noelani knocks this time, too, but just like before gets no answer.

Emmi follows her into the deathly silent apartment when she produces a key, looking around. “Have you tried calling those classes he always went to?”

“This morning. They said they haven’t seen him.”

Emmi hums, shuffling closer to the coffee table. The whole place is weirdly barren, empty. Tarquin seems fit the bill of being so weirdly personal with all of his belongings that it strikes her as odd. There’s nothing on the walls, no decor besides basic furniture, and even the glass-front cupboards only have a few dishes in each on them.

“Tarquin?” Noelani tries. The creak of her feet in the hall are louder than they normally would be.

“We really lost our other human, didn’t we?”

“Don’t say that,” Noelani murmurs. He’s not here, though. That much is obvious. Emmi reaches for the lone book on the coffee table - a very fine layer of dust has settled over-top of it. It’s Shakespeare. That would have been the one thing he would have touched no matter what.

Wherever he’s been the past two days, it hasn’t been in here.

She follows Noelani into his room, watching her shift her entire top half out of the open window, craning her neck to look up the fire escape.

“Sabre said they were up there, just before,” she says. “He didn’t see him come back down.”

“Well, at least he didn’t fall,” Emmi comments. His dead body on the sidewalk would have been a pretty obvious giveaway if he had.

Noelani doesn’t look convinced, though. They’re not going to find out what happened by standing there, though. His bed is made, cool to the touch, uncreased. There are a few boxes tucked under it and taped shut, two more poking out of the closet. He’s definitely somewhere, okay or not okay, dead or alive, but this place already seems like a ghost town.

“He probably just took off for a few days,” Emmi concludes, something she’s not sure she even believes. “If I was normal and all of this shit was going down around me, I’d probably have left too.”

“But why would he not tell anyone?”

“Who knows why humans do what they do.”

Noelani sighs and pulls the window shut, sliding the lock back around. It resists for so long Emmi can’t help but wonder if he locks the window at all.

Judging by the state of the apartment and the window itself, when he went up the fire escape he never came back in. That leaves the roof or the ground. He could have climbed most of the way down to the alley below and dropped a few feet, but then he ran? With nothing to his name? Even his wallet is still here; he wouldn’t make it very far.

There’s something wrong with this. There’s a lot wrong with this, Emmi knows.

“We should report this,” Noelani decides. “We can’t just—”

“And what are the police going to do?” she fires back. “The same thing they did for Nic? They’ll put two and two together, realizing he’s from the same building, and they won’t do  _ anything.  _ Worst case scenario, they think we did something to him, and then we’re in deeper shit than we already are.”

“So what, then?”

“For now?” she clarifies. “Nothing. Keep an eye out for him. Tell everyone else to do the same. A few days from now, if nothing’s changed, then we re-consider our options.”

Noelani fiddles with the window lock for a moment longer, pinching it between her fingers. Finally she turns to face Emmi, arms wrapped tight around herself.

“We’ll find him,” Emmi promises. “Okay?”

Noelani nods, looking unconvinced. Emmi’s not so sure either.

But she does, at least, have an idea of where to start, and she’s going to do just that.

—

Emmi heads back into the apartment downstairs with a purpose.

She feels infinitely more confident this time, but falters a bit as soon as she walks in. One of them has managed to coax Isperia out of the bathroom; she’s standing up against the far wall next to the television, relying on it so heavily that Emmi wonders if she’s trying to camouflage into it.

She might as well be.

“So,” Soran drawls. “Have we lost him or not?”

She wishes he was close enough to hit, but he’s on the opposite end of the couch. “Sure have,” she tells him. “And I’m beginning to think  _ she  _ had something to do with that.”

It’s the first time she’s referred to her as something other than an  _ it  _ \- she can’t very well do that, now. Isperia swallows, hands tightening against the wall where she had previously had them flattened. Emmi didn’t realize before but she’s  _ small _ , smaller than she ever would have guessed. Five feet, if she’s lucky, and thin as a rail.

Okay, maybe she’s beginning to second guess herself.

“You’re right, she does look like the type of person to make someone go missing,” Soran says flatly, tinged with sarcasm. She should have thrown something at him other than socks earlier.

“If it had nothing to do with him, then what was it?” she challenges. “Because it was something. They’re not here for no reason.”

All three of them open their mouths, even Isperia, but she rounds on her before she can hear an answer. “There are fifty-six more of you out there somewhere. The government says they rounded all of them up, but that’s obviously not true, so what’s the deal? How many of them do you think are still out there?”

“I think,” Icarus starts, but she silences him with a look. She wasn’t explicitly talking to him, you see.

“How many?” she repeats.

Isperia swallows. “Most of them, I’d say.”

“The government spews a lot of bullshit,” Soran says. “They’re saying that because they’re trying to quell the panic. People are losing their shit out here.  _ Someone  _ is losing their shit in here, in fact.”

“It’s been two days. If she was trying to kill us, she would have by now,” Icarus adds. Two days can be a long time, but it can also be nothing at all. “I didn’t like it either, at first, but…”

“But what?”

Icarus looks at her. Actually, properly looks at her, as if trying to get his message across. “Does she really look like she’s going to do anything?”

When he stands up, it becomes obvious just how small she is. Emmi, even, could likely scoop her up with one arm and throw her out the window. She may not even fight back, judging by what Emmi is looking at right now. A stiff wind could blow through this place and carry her right away.

“So what, then?” Emmi asks. “She’s just going to stay here? You’re moving someone else in and letting them steal half your clothes?”

“Well, Tarquin’s place might be empty now, so…”

“I hate you,” she cuts in. “So fucking much.”

“I don’t think kicking her out now would be very nice,” Icarus points out. “She did ask us, after all.”

“You’re only saying that because you got kicked out and you didn’t like it one bit.” Icarus frowns at that. She’s stuck on the fact that Isperia  _ did  _ ask. Did she ask to stay, specifically, or did she ask for help? And what could she have possibly been asking for help for?

There’s a goddamn alien in Soran’s apartment. She’s still having trouble wrapping her brain around it.

“I’ll figure it out,” Soran says. “I’ll buy her clothes, whatever. She can leave if she wants to. I don’t care.”

Isperia doesn’t look like she wants to leave, is the problem. Soran had enough trouble letting one person in here, and now he’s allowing a second? She’s beginning to suspect that maybe Isperia  _ did  _ do something to him while he was asleep.

“No,” she decides. “No, I’ll do it.”

“What?”

“I’ll do it,” she repeats. “She can come with me.”

Emmi doesn’t trust this one bit. She’s not leaving this situation alone until she’s got a read on it, and right now all she can tell is that Isperia is scared. Of Emmi, most probably, but of something else too, and she’s not hiding it as well as she thinks she is.

From then on, it’s a staredown in which no one moves until she strides to Soran’s side. “Wallet,” she demands.

“So I have to pay for this even if I’m not going?”

“Yes.”

He sighs, digs in out, and drops it into her open, waiting palm. Still, Isperia doesn’t move, inching up even further against the wall as if that’s going to help.

“You can go with her,” Soran encourages. “I don’t  _ think  _ she’ll bite you.”

Emmi smacks him with the wallet, revelling slightly too much in the slap of the leather against his . skin. Isperia is still looking to him for confirmation,  _ reassurance,  _ even, as if Soran is anywhere near reassuring to anyone except Icarus.

A few days ago he wasn’t reassuring to anyone. Maybe he’s learning.

“Let’s go,” she commands, stepping back to the door. Isperia detaches herself from the wall so quick Emmi expects a wild dart back to the safety of the bathroom - she springs, practically, for the door instead, and ducks under Emmi’s arm into the hall. Her head is down the whole while, eyes fixated on the floor.

On second thought, Emmi reaches back in and grabs one of the hats off the back of the door to jam down over her head. Her hair is a practical beacon. “Look at me,” she says, expecting resistance. Isperia looks up at her slowly, a snail’s pace, every movement like a cry for help.

Emmi goes back for the first pair of sunglasses she sees. Whoever they belong to, whichever one of them left them so close, she doesn’t care.

“Keep these on,” she instructs, sliding them over-top her ears to conceal the brightness of her eyes, which are even more vivid in the daylight. Isperia voices no complaint. She reaches up to touch the frames, fingers gentle, and drops them as soon as she notices Emmi watching.

She looks back at the two of them still in the apartment. It’s stupid, but it could be the last time.

You never know.

“Are you bringing her back in one piece?” Soran asks. Emmi closes the door without responding.

That’s one she’s not willing to answer, just yet.

—

Herding Isperia into a car is no easy feat.

Everything else is… surprisingly simple.

She’s silent the entire time, offering Emmi little comfort, but that makes it less difficult. For a moment she had lingered in the parking lot too long, staring at whatever the twisted hunk of metal sunken into the alley was, but there had been police lingering about it, taping it off. Emmi had all but shoved her headfirst into the car as if she were under arrest.

She chooses a cluster of shops that they can get in and out of easily enough, but Isperia offers next to no input, watching everything she picks up with a careful eye. Most of the time she reaches out to touch whatever Emmi waves at her and then puts her hand back down. The only comment she ever gets is to buy bigger things; everything she ends up purchasing looks as if it’s going to swallow her whole.

Whatever, though. They’re clothes, and they’ll be hers, and she won’t look  _ quite  _ so ridiculous in them.

She throws in a hat that actually fits her, for good measure, and searches high or low for something better to hide her eyes, but comes up empty.

The first sign of anything remotely human that she gets is Isperia’s outstretched hands when Emmi finally acquires so many bags she begins to have trouble balancing them. She hands her one, unthinking, and instead of holding it by the handle like a normal person she clutches it against her chest and wraps both arms around it.

It looks like a shield. Maybe it’s not such a human interaction after all.

Emmi can’t help but watch her, knowingly making it worse. Isperia won’t look her in the eye - won’t, or can’t. Even the sunglasses haven’t produced this ability for her.

She watches the blur of the buildings pass by in the car. Emmi can’t make out her eyes but her jaw is slightly slack, awe loosening her features until what she really looks like is finally obvious. She looks young, untouched by anything bad, like Emmi used to look once.

“What’s it look like up there?” she asks. The silence is crawling along with the radio turned down practically to zero.

Isperia’s jaw tightens once again. “It’s… dark.”

Two more words than she expected to get. Dark up there, light down here. There’s so much to look at; the people and the buildings, the reflections these things produce, the water and the blue, blue sky. Emmi always understood the phrase  _ it’s like another world _ , and she had thought as much when she had stepped foot here, but now it was literal.

“What are you so scared of that you asked for help?” Emmi tries. She’s already gotten one more answer than she anticipated. This could be considered pushing it.

Isperia leans back into her seat, fixating on the edge of it, fingers scratching at the leather. It’s all new.

“They’re going to do something,” she says quietly.

“Do what?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” Emmi questions. It feels more like an interrogation than a conversation. Isperia shakes her head.

It goes quiet, again. Emmi can’t tell if she’s supposed to believe her, or not. Would someone so assuming really lie about such a major fact, or can Emmi begin the shaky process of trusting a single word that comes out of her mouth?

She wishes she knew, but no one would. Some would trust openly, without reservations, as they always do. Emmi hasn’t had that luxury for a very long time.

“What happened to your arm?” Isperia asks, voice hardly a whisper. She’s staring, now, or at least the square shape of her glasses are.

Emmi doesn’t think about it, anymore, and no one’s asked in quite a while. Even Icarus, for all his nosiness, has kept his mouth shut.

“I lost it,” she says plainly, hyper-aware of the sarcasm tainting her tone.

“How?”

For fuck’s sake, of all the things to get pushy about and this is it? She doesn’t look capable of pushing anything, physically or metaphorically. It doesn’t help that Emmi is never in the mood for this conversation, and right now is no exception. It’s possible she’s even less in the mood for it than she usually is.

Emmi pulls back into the parking lot, trying to work up an appropriate answer. Isperia looks nervous again. Perhaps she’s finally realized how her nosiness is paying off; that is, not well.

She’s gripping the steering wheel too tight, one-handed because she doesn’t  _ have the other,  _ and Isperia suddenly looks as scared as she did when Emmi first walked into the bathroom.

And now she feels bad. Of fucking course.

“Are you really going to stay here?” she asks, letting the car rumble on. She could still drive them somewhere and bury Isperia six feet under, if that’s what things called for, but here she is outfitting her and driving her right back. There’s been no Gods in existence that Emmi has prayed to for a very long time, but she hopes that whichever ones are listening are watching her make the right choice.

“I don’t have anywhere else to go,” Isperia says. Emmi pulls the keys from the ignition, and she tracks the motion with her eyes until she relaxes slightly once again.

As unpredictable as today has been, Emmi still has enough surprise left inside her to feel it when Isperia suddenly springs from the car, fast as can be. The door shuts before Emmi even looks back up. When she does, Isperia is halfway across the lot, making a straight shot towards the alley and whatever’s lying in the middle of it.

“Hey!” she calls, even though Isperia is more than gone, and definitely can’t hear her. Emmi leaps out after her and just manages to catch her arm before she can slip under the caution tape. The police have cleared out, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay.

“We’re trying to be conspicuous, remember?” she reminds her, but Isperia continues tugging at her grip until she pulls them both under, a worrying strength hidden in such a small frame.

Emmi’s never been this close to the thing. By the time she came downstairs, the police were already swooping in.

And Isperia was gone. She really does fucking hate Soran some days.

It’s metal and cracked glass and things Emmi can hardly identify, charred by the smoke. Bits of reflective light strips still cling to its twisted edges, and where she must have been seated is still there, though blackened and melted from how long it burned. They likely got her out of it in the nick of time.

“Not a very durable ship,” she comments. A bird lands on the top of it as she watches, dark as ink and just about bigger than her head. For how much misfortune has been going on around here, she hasn’t seen a raven in quite a long time.

It caws at them, obnoxiously loud. She can’t help but wonder if it’s foreshadowing death, too.

“Escape pod,” Isperia corrects. The words don’t sit well with her. A ship would mean intention, purpose, a flight path. An escape pod means something… worse. For the things that came in them, anyway.

Maybe that means they’re better off, then. If Isperia really is right, if she has nowhere else to go, then maybe they were running all along.

Emmi knows all about that.

She wants to ask, but doesn’t. Her stomach has settled a bit, and she’s asked enough questions. Isperia reaches a hand out to touch the broken outer frame, curling her fingers around even the sharpest shards of metal. Even the bird leaps down a hair closer, head cocked curiously. It’s just as mystified by this whole thing as Emmi is.

“What are they going to do with it?” Isperia asks, a sadness in the layers of her voice that Emmi has yet to hear. The bird is looking at them like it, too, wants to know.

She just wishes this bird would go away.

“Get rid of it,” she assumes. Like they’re saying they’ve gotten rid of everything. That’s what they do - they lie. Everyone does. Emmi is doing it constantly.

Isperia will learn that eventually.

“If you’re staying,” she starts, unsure of where to head from there. Isperia squints up at her even wearing sunglasses, but doesn’t raise a hand to shield the sun from her eyes. “Fuck. I don’t know. Do you want to come somewhere with me?”

There’s no use breeding fear the way she has so far. Emmi lives with enough of it in her day to day life, wondering who’s behind her, where she goes, what could possibly happen next. Here she has an opportunity to at least control something of it. This is the metaphorical fork in the road. The decisions she makes here shapes how their future goes.

She’d like it to be better than her past.

“Okay,” Isperia murmurs. Her hand slips off of the machinery, and the bird perches where her fingers had been, poking at it curiously.

It follows them all the way back to the building, too, wheeling overhead until it lands on the perch above the door, watching with keen eyes as they step back in. They’ll come back for the bags, later. They’re inconsequential to everything else Emmi has running through her head.

It would be easy to return Isperia unscathed, to leave her in hands that are clearly more certain of this than she is.

But Emmi wants to be.

She stops outside of her own apartment door, instead, testing the handle. It’s unlocked, still, which means at least one person is home. All of them, maybe.

“Do you have nicknames up there?” Emmi asks. She reaches forward to pluck the glasses from Isperia’s face - there’s no use hiding it in here, and she better get used to the sudden light before she’s pounced on.

There is an awful lot of it here, after all.

“Do I need one?”

No. No, she doesn’t. Emmi considers it anyway. “I like Ria,” she muses. Easy, simple, to the point. So much more human than it was before.

“Ria,” she says slowly, testing it out. “That’s good.”

“Is it?”

She nods. For the first time, Emmi sees something like a smile almost form on her face, the true softness of it in full view for the first time. Emmi feels ten times more confident opening the door upon seeing that, knowing that whoever else is here will see the same thing.

It’s everyone. They’re all piled around the living room - Arwen, Mal, and Jupiter spread out across both couches and Percy cross-legged on the floor, balancing his laptop precariously on one knee.

Waiting until they all look her way is not an easy thing. It’s not an easy thing realizing it’s not just her, either.

“Guys,” she says. “This is Ria.”

There’s no going back from this, now.


	3. The One With The Gun

**Saturday, June 17th.** **  
** **Four days after.**

This place is different.

She knew it would be long before they ever got here, but no preparation was enough.

They had no idea what to expect, really. She had barely had her eyes open a year, so she wasn’t the one to ask anyway. She hadn’t known what Muelara had seen in the eighteen years she had been alone, and hadn’t the gall to ask. Not many of them did. She’s sure some of them had tried, though. She even knew which ones would have.

They were gone, now. Somewhere out there they were all roaming, assumingly free. They wouldn’t have let anyone catch them the way Emmi said.

She was free, too, and she was the most useless of them all. If she could stay free, they all could too.

And that was what worried her, at night. The dark had always done that to her. She had been born in it, Muelara had told her, put under in it too. She had woken up at eighteen to more of it. That’s all she had ever seen, all she had ever known. Until four days ago, Isperia hadn’t even so much light could exist.

Four days ago she still felt like Isperia.

She doesn’t know if she feels like Ria, either, or a poor imitation of whatever they’re trying to will her into being. She’s not normal, not human. She never will be. It only helps that she had found a group with an equal amount of oddities, and had been willing to ask for help. She hadn’t wanted to; her ideal would have been dying then and there, taking her secrets with her and all the darkness too.

Yet here she was, with the light. She didn’t know if she loved or hated it.

She  _ was _ , however, going to make an attempt at being Ria. She did like it. She didn’t know how to be that, just yet, but she would figure it out.

That was the thing with being up there. All of the expectations had nearly crushed her long before she had gotten down here, the work and the teachings and the failures, day in and day out. Like she said - she was useless. No one up there could do anything with  _ useless.  _

There was no running up there, either. She had made the decision as soon as she had hit the ground without thinking. She would die free, somewhere out here, rather than go out like the foot soldier she was meant to be.

If she was useless, though, she wasn’t even a soldier. She was just battle fodder. No one would weep over her. Muelara would lament the time she wasted trying to get her to be something more.

Isperia would die.

Ria wouldn’t, though. She wouldn’t allow that for as long as she was here.

For now she would just  _ be.  _ She had never done that before. Even her own history was jumbled. Kazatera was already gone by the time she had been born, supposedly a smoking ruin of a planet, the result of a civil war that their side, whatever that side even was, had barely scraped out of. It was still killing them, though. The damage had been done.

It hadn’t been an easy choice to pick up what was left and leave, but that was the only one they had. She was the last of them, the youngest.

They were meant to be sixty, but after her there were no more. Instead they had fifty-six and one chosen guardian, and that was it.

Fifty-seven wasn’t the number anyone wanted, but it was the one they got.

Muelara’s intentions were… something. Her fifty-six protegees weren’t going to win her any favors, and they certainly weren’t going to win any wars either, not scattered like this, unprepared and wild, finally free from the confines of a ship they had spent nineteen years on.

She had been in a cryosleep tube for eighteen of them, growing and changing and evolving into this, whatever this even was. Something that wasn’t as good as the others, in any case.

And now she was here. In a bathtub.

They all found that strange. She didn’t like that they found it strange.

Strange was bad. Different was bad. Muelara had tried to beat it out of them until they were perfect, or close to it, the last existing specimens of their kind. The one full year Isperia had was filled with countless disappointments and wrong-doings, unkind words that rang over and over until they were all she could hear. Maybe she wasn’t good, but she wasn’t bad either. Or at least she didn’t want to be.

So she wouldn’t be. She would be Ria, whatever that entailed. If she died Ria, it would be better than dying any other way.

Ria didn’t mind the bathtub, because it offered the same amount of comfort that anything else she had ever experienced did. Even sitting in the car with Emmi yesterday had been a foreign experience. There was more room than she was used to. The container had been small, of course, but she could still stretch out as much as she liked against the sun-warm leather of the seat. She had never felt that amount of warmth before. There was no imagining what it felt like, either. Only the cold.

They don’t like her in here, though. It unsettles them. When people are unsettled they turn it back on others; she knows that because she was the one it got turned on, more often than not.

Everyone was bigger, better, bolder. She either didn’t know how to be those things or couldn’t.

Ria makes to sure to be up and out of the bathroom by the time either of them wake, though she doesn’t manage to sit on the couch for very long. It’s too soft. Nice enough, but nothing she can stand for more than a few minutes at a time. She is a tad unsure of what to do, though - she has yet to wrap her brain around everything they’ve done in this little kitchen, but it’s not  _ too  _ hard. They haven’t poisoned her yet, so that’s good.

Whatever they were spreading that peanut butter stuff on yesterday is missing, though. Maybe they’re out of it? It tastes fine on its own, though. Ria knows because she’s tried it more often than necessary, even though she doesn’t need to. She doesn’t think they’ll miss too much of it. She won’t let there be that much of a dent for someone that has no point in eating.

The drawer is full of too many different pokey bits of silverware, and she picks up a fork to stick it inside the jar before she heads back with it, sitting herself down between the table and the edge of the couch. The floor is much better.

It’s not long before someone wakes - Soran, evidently, because his footsteps are more sure and not so half-asleep as Icarus’ seem to be. He gives her a long, measured look when he steps into the living room; her, or the jar of between butter. Ria reaches back to screw the lid on.

“Nice,” he comments. It doesn’t really look like he cares much, but either she’s lost the ability to speak or the peanut butter has glued her tongue to the roof of her mouth.

One of the various machines in the kitchen behind her whirs and starts to beep when he disappears. Whatever it is, they drink a lot of it.

It’s still making that same noise when Soran leans over her shoulder, dangling a spoon. “Make your life easier,” he invites, tugging the fork out of where she’s left it stuck upright in the peanut butter.

Okay, maybe she will be eating more than she had planned on. It’s not like anyone is stopping her.

Icarus looks like he wants to, when he finally appears. The look she’s on the receiving end of is ten times longer and more confused than the one she got originally.

It turns back into the default, though, of the past few days in here. Someone turns the television on. They’re talking. They’re drinking too much whatever and letting too much steam waft up into their faces. Most of all, they’re not bugging her. That’s been a relief since Emmi dragged her into the lives of the others; since then they’ve all been stopping by, poking their heads in, staring and asking questions she either doesn’t want to answer or won’t.

All of them, it seems, except for the ones they’re missing. Ria hasn’t the courage to ask about that just yet. She hopes one day she does.

The people here don’t look at her the way everyone else has, though. They look at her if she’s different in a sort of good way, beyond mystified, eyes always curious and probing. Looks she doesn’t like much, if she’s being honest, but they’re better than what she was getting before.

Up there everyone’s the same, minus her. She still looks the same as the rest of them regardless. The narrow, skinny frames, the white hair without a single change of tone or shade, the bright eyes.

You only stand out when you have nothing to offer.

She never wanted to stand out. That’s why it’s not so bad here. Most of the time they don’t make her feel that way, and whenever they do she doesn’t think it’s intentional. They’re so rarely fixated on her that it couldn’t be.

She turns her head as some of the clouds float on by, sending more sunlight streaming in through the sliding doors. The bird is there, again. Or at least she  _ thinks  _ it’s the same one. She saw it last night again, too, just before she retreated to the bathroom. There it sits, on the top of the railing, looking this way and that.

“Can I go out there?” she asks.

“You can go wherever the hell you want.”

She’s not sure, even, who gave her the answer, but she slides open the door and steps onto the fire escape, still unintentionally clutching the jar in the crook of her elbow. The bird gives a little hop to face her and makes an odd little rumbling noise, nothing like the loud cries yesterday when it had really looked at her.

It’s difficult to tell what it’s eyeing up more: her, or the peanut butter.

Ria sits down in the lone chair occupying the fire escape, rusted at the legs and wobbly despite her minimal weight. The raven stretches out its neck when she offers the spoon, darting out to scoop up the tiniest of bites before it retreats again.

Figures a bird of all things is socializing with her in the most casual of ways.

It looks like it could peck out her eyes and just about everything else if she’s not careful, but it seems less inclined to do so than it ever has before. It makes her feel better about stretching her hand out, though it’s eyes fixate on her pointer finger and stick too quickly for her liking.

“That thing is going to bite your fucking finger off,” Icarus guesses, poking his head out the door.

She misses the bird’s little hop again, but the sudden and quick flap of its wings turns her attention back to it just in time for it to ease off the railing and land on her arm.

Suffice to say, she almost falls backwards out of the chair.

“What in the  _ hell _ ?” Icarus emphasizes. She’s stretched her arm out as far as it can get away from her face but the raven clings on tighter, talons digging into the shirt bunched up around her elbow. Once settled it flattens down again, wings tucked in. The noise, again. Quieter this time.

It looks… weirdly content.

She gets to her feet, slowly. The raven doesn’t move. It’s heavy, too, making her arm bob about as she stands.

“You better not bring that fucking thing in here,” Icarus says. He darts out for the abandoned jar on the chair, leaving her more than enough room to wedge the door open further. Soran is still standing in the kitchen, watching her impassively over the brim of his mug.

They’re not quite inside yet, but almost. Soran puts the mug down and walks over, crouching down slightly as if he can actually look it in the eyes and have it understand something.

The bird just looks like it wants to peck his eyes out, instead of hers.

“Don’t you dare,” Soran says slowly, stretching his hand out. Almost instantly the raven snaps at it, beak working towards the nearest finger. “It’s my birthday, jackass, don’t bite me.”

“It’s your what now?” Icarus asks, returning to the door. He’s got the peanut butter back. It looks as if he was about to flee with it until he heard those words. “How old are you, now? Six thousand?”

“Feels like it,” Soran mutters. “You’re not going to be able to get that thing to leave, now.”

She didn’t think so. The raven isn’t going anywhere by the looks of it but she sort of… doesn’t want it to. That she’s decided, unintentionally. She doesn’t want to disturb it.

Maybe it’s just as curious about her as everyone else is. The only difference is it can’t ask.

“Please don’t let that thing live with us,” Icarus begs, wheeling around Soran to use him as a shield by the looks of it. He’d have an easier time using the peanut butter.

“Make it leave, then.”

The noise it makes this time is slightly angrier, louder. More like yesterday, even, and then it slides up a few inches closer to her head.

Icarus sighs, and rapidly reconsiders holding a finger out, by the looks of it. Soran might just try again, though, and she already knows what the outcome will be.

No one’s ever chosen her before, made the decision to help her, stuck close by.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a bird.

It’s the first, and it’s a feeling she could get used to.

—

Even it ends up leaving, though.

Ria doesn’t really recognize what it’s doing until it’s spent fifteen minutes hopping up and down by the sliding door, and when she opens it it hops out and then struggles for a minute to get airborne before it wheels up and away.

Injured, maybe. Desperate for help like she was. It’s not quite as fast as she thinks it should be, but she doesn’t know any better.

It leaves for a while, but comes back too. It’s never gone for very long. It sits on the railing as if it’s making sure she’s still there before it takes off again.

It’s still gone when the sun goes down, and they  _ did  _ say she could go wherever she wanted. She puts on another layer and a hat, pulling up a hood too just to make sure. There’s no sign of it close-by, and Ria doesn’t feel nearly comfortable enough to walk very far. Even moving away from the parking lot behind the building is a big step. There aren’t many people out at this time, and the city is quieting the darker it gets, but it’s still not safe.

Especially for her. She feels well-hidden enough, more than concealed, but that doesn’t mean she’s safe. From what she can tell, things are happening even to the people that  _ do  _ feel safe, if they’re going missing by the rate she thinks they are.

She loops around the building, making sure it’s always in sight, and wanders a bit down the main road. It’s brightest here and there are more people, but not one of them glances at her for any longer than they ought to. She could blend in. She could live here.

She takes a side-road back, a sharp incline of houses tucked back at the end of short driveways, and then cuts through another so she meets the back right corner of the parking lot once again. Still no raven, but there is someone in the lot that wasn’t there before, sitting on a curb not far from the back door. They pay her no mind until she approaches it, and then their head swivels around in her direction.

Ria expects a certain few things. Someone with her eyes, immediately. One of them’s found her, and they’re coming to retrieve her, to drag her back kicking and screaming. How much of a fight would she really put up, useless as she is?

She expects horrible, bad, evil incarnate.

It’s not. Just a person. Brown eyes, she thinks, obvious from a distance, though the sclera almost looks… gray. There’s a deep cut along his brow-bone, ragged at the edges, not bleeding whatsoever.

Her stomach does an odd little flip.

“You live here now?” he asks, resting more easily on the curb. His hood is drawn all the way up, just like hers.

Strangers aren’t so easily given this information, right? Strangers shouldn’t be given this information at all. That, let alone the fact that he’s sitting out here past dark alone, is something she has to worry about the longer she looks at him.

But he’s not doing anything. He’s just watching.

His eyes look more gray the longer she stares.

Ria feels even more sick when she nods, though she shouldn’t.

He hums quietly. The noise doesn't sound all the way right. “How’s that going for you?”

Something’s just not right about all of this. Someone wouldn’t be asking unless they were looking for a truthful answer, but why does a stranger need such a thing? She’s spent time making sure she knew the names and faces of everyone in this building before they knew hers; that was how they worked. That was how  _ she  _ worked.

This is different, unfamiliar. She has never been a fan of such things.

Ria doesn’t answer because she doesn’t have a good one for him, certainly not what he’s looking for. She couldn’t even begin to guess. The door behind her creaks open before he can say anything else - with it facing the opposite way she can’t quite see who it is just yet, but turns to them anyway. She hears footsteps, retreating instead of getting closer, and when she glances over her shoulder the stranger is gone.

It was too quick. No one leaves that fast unless they need a clean getaway.

“What are you doing out here?”

Ria jolts, having already forgotten about the door opening and whoever was exiting. It only takes her a second to recognize the face and pull up a name - Sabre. The one and only person who hasn’t come to seek her out in some respect, who hasn’t been blatantly curious. She expected something more intimidating out of him, someone who held no regard for others and who couldn’t possibly spend time worrying about them.

He’s not, though. Just objectively blank, quiet even when speaking, hand still holding onto the open door.

A lot like her, really, if she had something to hold onto.

“You shouldn’t be alone out here,” he says.

She swallows. “Why not?”

“Because you shouldn’t,” he replies, offering no further explanation. “Trust me.”

She doesn’t. Up there you’re not supposed to trust anybody. That’s what Muelara always said. You trust yourself, occasionally the others, certainly not anything walking around on two legs down on planet earth. They’re liars. That’s what she always said.

Ria is a liar too, though.

Sabre is still holding the door open. It’s not an order. He’s not the type for those, she suspects. Something about him standing there urges her forward anyway, and she ducks under his arm and into the building, saving them both from the painful awkwardness of waiting for the elevator 

in silence by darting up the stairs instead.

There’s a light on in the apartment. Just the one, above the stove. They’re both presumably asleep, but one of them has ensured that she won’t be stumbling through the dark for the time being.

It’s like they know.

Despite that, something in her stomach still has yet to settle after whatever happened downstairs. She even forces herself to stay in the living room, light on, the foreign softness of the couch underneath her. She won’t sleep much out here, if at all, but she doesn’t think she would anywhere.

It’s odd down here. Muelara was right about one thing.

Sleep comes, eventually, in fitfut bursts, but just before the first she notices the raven out on the fire escape, hunkered down on the railing as the wind buffets at it, dark feathers blown askew.

She thinks she should go get it.

She doesn’t quite make it before she falls asleep.

—

They’re both gone when she wakes, again, and someone else has replaced them.

Ria doesn’t expect to find slumber until the sun comes up, but it’s pouring in by the time she opens her eyes and the raven is staring at her expectantly from the other side of the door, as if waiting to be let in.

There’s another person staring at it too. Meris has her legs folded up underneath her in the chair opposite Ria, eyes watching the sun beam in new patterns across the floor.

Ria gets up without announcing herself to open the door. The raven stays on the railing until she offers her arm and then gives a silent hop onto it just above her wrist. When she turns around Meris’ head is cocked almost like the bird’s would be in another time, eyes absolutely perplexed.

“Okay?” she tries, the word less certain than she intends it to be, most definitely.

The bird clings to her forearm for as long as it can, but it only has her bare skin as an option, and as soon as she gives it another option it hops down onto the arm of the couch, waddling about.

“This is so fucking weird,” Meris mutters. “Do aliens have a strange connection with animals that we aren’t aware of?”

“Don’t think so.”

She was told everything. Right? Muelara wouldn’t lie to them all about something so trivial - unless she was just lying to Ria. It doesn’t seem like something she’d do, but then again, who knows. Not one person was counting on her making it to the end of all of this. All she ever knew was that humans were different, bad different, and things that weren’t human were unavoidable, but even worse. It’s hard pairing those words with what she’s learning now.

Even Meris doesn’t seem… bad, per-say. She has a very interesting face, but so does Ria. It has the potential to be soft. She sees flashes of it when Meris looks away, when her confused eyes drift back to the bird.

Mostly she just looks intimidating, though, and considering she essentially gives people nightmares day in and day out, Ria would like to be on her good side.

They probably just asked her to baby-sit before they left, not that she needs it. She’s not  _ that  _ incapable.

“So, what else can you do?” Meris asks. “Does the whole hollow skeleton deal mean you can fly?”

“No.”

“Really?”

“Some of us can. Not all.”

“And not you,” Meris assumes.

“No,” she murmurs. It’s never been her. Ria’s barely managed to even get her feet off the ground, and at that point it’s basic levitation instead of flight. Even a child could do that, and they could do much better too.

Sure, she’s got the brains - they all do. They don’t need to eat or drink, they can run on minimal sleep, they can understand things normal people couldn’t. It makes sense that there should be more, and she can’t blame any of them for assuming so. Meris is just repeating what Ria has heard for days now. She  _ should  _ be able to do more.

But she can’t.

Ria misses who walks in, next, too busy making assumptions about who it should be rather than all of the countless possibilities. She’s surprised when Mel leans over the back of the couch to look between them, and he’s equally surprised when he notices the bird perched on the cushion to his left, letting out a swear.

“Why is that in here?” he asks wildly. The raven lets out an almost incredulous squawk and hops closer to her again, as if looking for back-up.

If only she was in the mind-set to do so.

“Been asking myself the same thing,” Meris tells him. She still isn’t sure if they look right together, but there’s no time to really think about it. Meris is still looking at her, clearly waiting for further answers. She must be on the Emmi train in terms of suspicion.

Ria wishes she could say it wasn’t warranted.

The bird pecks at the couch right next to her hand, a silent call for attention. Mel’s eyes flicker from it, up to her, over to Meris.

The quiet stretches on.

“Anyway, can you come with me?” Mel asks. “You, Meris, not the bird.”

“Why?”

“Because I asked, and you love me,” he says confidently, reaching for her hand and giving her a tug that nearly sends her sprawling out onto the floor. “Let’s go.”

“Why?” she repeats.

“ _ Because _ ,” he emphasizes, pulling her towards the door. She’s the more intimidating of the pair by far, but he’s got such a distinct advantage on her in terms of size that she can do little to fight him as he drags her into the hall.

He closes the door, but not before he offers her a sunny smile over Meris’ heads.

She gets the distinct feeling he doesn’t actually want her for anything. At least someone is looking out for Ria and the various times a day she gets heckled about something or other, considering she can hardly look after herself.

Maybe she does need a baby-sitter.

On cue, the raven leaps up onto her thigh and clings on, finding sufficient and thick enough clothing to do so without injuring her. It looks up at her, eyes bright and curious, before it settles down on her leg.

Unless she already has one.

—

“What are you guys doing?” Emmi asks.

“Well,” Soran starts, jerking his thumb back towards her. “ _ She  _ wants to go for a walk, but got a very Sabre-esque warning directly from the man himself about going out at night. You know how he is.  _ He  _ doesn’t like being left alone for longer than five minutes, and —”

Ria misses the rest of the evidently important conversation because of the sour face Icarus makes in response to being called out on something that is, from her little experience, actually quite accurate. She almost lets a little giggle escape.

Emmi ends up tagging along, too, so whatever she missed was even grander than she thought.

Maybe they shouldn’t be walking around in the dark but it seems safer, now. This time even the raven is wheeling overhead. If it is hurt it’s doing better now.

She considers holding out her arm for the first few blocks, knowing that if she does the bird will no doubt swoop down to find her once again. It’s not right, though. Ria is trying to draw  _ less  _ attention to herself, not more.

Hidden amongst the three of them Ria looks like nothing at all. They’re all so much more without even acting like it.

It’s good to get out. Not so good that she feels responsible for dragging everyone else with her, but that’s her decision and it’s theirs, too, whether she can rationalize each one or not. They could have let her go out alone. They likely would have in any other circumstance.

At least one of them is keeping an eye out at any given time. There are still two people that have up and disappeared, no sign of them to be found. Ria has little idea as to why, or even  _ how  _ they could still be so close-by, but still finds herself looking too. There are enough places to hide; it’s too much even if a few sets of eyes are actively looking. Adding one more set isn’t going to hurt anyone.

It’s getting late, though, and there are still people out and about, on the sidewalks and crossing the streets and getting into their cars narrowly parked along the side of the road. There are people in front of them and behind them, cutting through side-streets and passing by as if nothing at all is wrong with their lives. There shouldn’t be. They’re normal people, and they’ve done nothing wrong.

Then again, neither has Ria, and it feels like something is wrong all around her.

They’ve been walking for quite a bit, but Ria still turns up a wide-set of steps at the next intersection and everyone turns after her. It leads up into a hill overflowing with vegetation and large trees; she hasn’t seen so much green since she’s been here. There are little parks interspersed around the building, but this is the biggest one she’s seen thus far. As soon as she saw two people peel up the steps fifty yards ahead of them she knew where she was going.

It’s dark, but it’s lovely. There’s something ethereal about the way the trees shift in the dark, the shift of the grass. Overhead she hears the loud call of a bird, and even though the trees are blocking her view she knows exactly what it was.

A pair of people follow them up into the park too, two more shadows amongst the trees. It appears she’s not the only one who thinks it’s worth coming into.

They’re quiet, though, and Ria keeps turning back, expecting the pair to have disappeared only to find them a little bit closer each time.

She stops. The pair slows, behind them. Emmi offers a muffled noise of complaint as she bumps into her and then side-steps around her.

Ria is prepared to wait, but Soran grabs her arm and drags her after them, all the way back to his side. She’s forced to walk, again. “They’ve been following us for five blocks,” he says under his breath, not even looking back.

That’s not good. All three of them have been quieter for the last ten minutes or so. Was Ria really the last to know?

It looks that way.

“Listen to me,” Soran says. “The second we get off this path, past those benches, take her and get out of the way.”

“You want me to  _ leave _ ?” Icarus asks indignantly. He’s talking about the two of them. Neither are going to be very good if this is headed to a fight, which looks likely. Ria doesn’t even need help getting out of the way; she can be a coward just fine on her own, thanks.

A group of young girls pass them, clearly past the point of normal intoxication, giggling and yelling obnoxiously. A middle-aged woman sitting at the last of the illuminated benches towards the end of the path watches them pass, something tired in her eyes. Nothing happens. Soran slows a bit, and it’s easy to match his pace. She was already practically running to keep up in the first place.

Ria doesn’t dare look back for confirmation, but they must be gaining ground, and that’s exactly what Soran is trying to do. Get them close enough.

“Emmi,” Soran says. “Back-up?”

“Got it. I’ll go left?”

He nods. In a short minute or two Ria is going to be looking at two dead bodies, and she knows exactly which ones they’ll be, if she doesn’t throw up into a bush first.

They pass the bench. The woman pays them no mind. Ria pays her too much.

And it’s a good thing she does, because a knife flashes out towards them.

All of Ria’s instincts are blown to smithereens in the face of panic. It’s Soran who actually  _ reacts _ , the knife missing him by a practical mile, and Icarus is the one who yanks them both back, albeit gracelessly. The woman is up on her feet now, knife gleaming in her hand, something fierce in her eyes.

And that’s it, really. There’s something pathetic about it all. She goes for Emmi, this time, and Soran grabs her by the arm, twisting until it’s pinned behind her back and the knife goes clattering to the pavement.

Ria expects something to snap in her arm. Soran turns his wrist just enough that she can envision the elbow shattering already.

She drops like her legs have been cut out from under her, head jerked up by an awful sounding  _ crack  _ that sends her chin splaying sideways. A neck broken just from a thought, a wish…

Someone crashes into her from behind. She had already forgotten about the people behind them.

She smashes into the pavement face-first, someone’s heavy weight on top of her. There’s blood in the back of her throat from wherever she bit down.

The weight disappears off of her, or perhaps she’s dragged out from underneath it by someone’s hands underneath her arms. They have to be Icarus’. They’re supposed to be his. Someone screams, and then gurgles. Ria has yet to get her legs out from under her, but rights herself in time to see Emmi bury the abandoned knife in one of their jugulars. Blood spurts over the pathway, and five feet away Ria finds herself backing even further, leaving Icarus as a buffer between them. It’s awful to say.

The last one, the third, looks as if he’s trying to get away after realizing what a mistake this all was. Emmi passes the knife over into Soran’s waiting hand.

He doesn’t even get the chance to scream.

“Fuck me,” Icarus breathes. There’s not a bush close enough to throw up in, so she works on shoving it down.

An arm winds around her neck, so tight that she chokes and coughs as she’s pulled back against a body twice the size of her own. She squirms, despite how futile it is. Icarus whirls on them in time for another woman to appear, and this one has a knife too, much larger and wicked looking.

That couple they followed in here was not a normal couple at all.

And so three becomes five, if only the three weren’t already dead.

“Stop squirming, kid,” the man holding onto her says, pressing down harder on her throat. She feels something scrape against the side of her scalp, and she knows what it is despite it not making sense, the cool weight of the gunmetal.

She has no choice but to stop. She’s going to die if she doesn’t.

She might just die anyway.

Emmi’s on her feet, now. The woman is still a few feet back, but between her and Icarus, clearly wondering who she should be holding her knife to. Ria thinks it’s pretty obvious, and right on cue Soran rips the knife out of the dead guy’s throat more savagely than she thinks anything really needs to be done.

“Don’t make me rupture all of your internal organs,” Soran warns. He’ll do it, too. She has no doubt about that.

“And risk an accidental bullet to the head? You won’t.” He takes another step back, dragging her even further from them. She’s already too far.

“You can have her back if she comes with us,” the woman offers. It takes her a stupidly long amount of time to realize she’s talking to Emmi. They want  _ Emmi _ . She would have bet a hundred times over, confidently, that Soran was the target here.

It’s a good thing she’s not a gambler.

They all look bewildered, and Emmi’s not moving, and Ria might just end up dying for her cause, whatever that may be. Whatever she looks is not bewildered - it’s terrified.

Emmi’s eyes flicker to hers. She’s realizing the same thing.

She doesn’t want to die for this. Maybe that makes her awful. She doesn’t want to die, not for this, never for this. She just wanted to live.

She hears wings flapping above her, too, and thinks hysterically that maybe it’s actually coming to save her. Ria can hardly look up, but it’s there. Circling above them, getting lower and lower, the raven’s keen eyes watching over all of them.

And then it drops to the ground right in front of them, but it’s no longer a bird.

It’s a person.

The man holding her swears, jerking them both back in his surprise. Ria’s legs have turned to jelly. It was the raven a second ago, flapping about above their heads as if it was about to come down and peck his eyes out the way she was envisioning, and now it’s a person. Two legs, standing straight, one arm tucked closer to their side than the other. Just like the bird was.

Oh God.

They’re not facing her. Emmi  _ gasps _ , a more genuine sound than Ria’s ever heard come out of her mouth. Icarus gets out a garbled mess of noises that isn’t any actual words.

Somehow the most alarming reaction of all is how wide Soran’s eyes go. That says it all more than anything else ever could.

They turn towards her, and she expects anything other than normalcy. Besides the eyes, they’re any other person. It’s not like the guy in the parking lot, though. That was a subtle difference, possibly even her imagination.

The one she’s looking at now, whoever he is, has no way to hide it. His eyes are whited out completely from corner to corner, as if possessed, or gone somewhere else entirely.

The arm around her throat loosens and then falls away, along with the gun. The man himself makes a small, almost confused noise as she feels him take a few steps away from her, still clutching the gun. Ria dives forward without thinking about the possible repercussions until she slams into Icarus’ side. He only has eyes for whoever the stranger is in the middle of their odd circle, but she looks towards the man again. He’s stumbling about, zigzagging slowly through the grass as if his brain is telling him one direction and his heart the other. As if something else is controlling him.

Everything begins to fall into place. Him letting go, his confused actions, the stranger’s white eyes.

He looks up towards the woman, his partner, his only other person left standing. The gun in his hand shakes when he raises it towards her.

“Bishop,” she snarls. “What the fuck are you—”

He pulls the trigger, and watches in stone-faced silence as it hits her in the forehead and tears out the other side, spraying bits of brain and bone into the grass. A strange action, someone killing the only person he had left. Not so strange if it’s not him at all. He still looks so perplexed in the eyes, eerily calm in every other respect.

His hands are careful as he reloads the gun and pulls the safety back once again. She feels like she should be doing something, but can’t. No one is.

He looks directly at her, and her only. His voice is his own, but something is distinctly wrong with it. “You might wanna close your eyes.”

She does. She squeezes them shut just in time for him to tilt the gun back under his own chin, finger resting above the trigger.

_ Bang. _

Ria thinks she already hears sirens in the distance.

The stranger still in the middle of them all shudders, as if his body has started to work properly for the first time. There’s still something wrong with his arm, though, an obvious injury that Ria has grown accustomed to in a different form, but his eyes go back to normal as all the white drains out of them. The possessor, not the possessed. There’s no question about it now.

And he went for the one that had her first, the one with the gun.

“This isn’t real, right,” Soran says flatly. He’s recovered from his initial bout of shock. “Someone’s about to tell me I’m hallucinating.”

“Nope,” Icarus says weakly.

“I’m glad we’re all proving to be gigantic fucking liars,” Emmi says. Her voice is rattled. Ria suspects it’s for more than one reason.

He’s still looking at her, though. It’s an awful thing to have someone looking at you like that when you don’t understand it one bit.

Worse, even, when everyone else does.

“Tarquin,” he says, voice surprisingly even. A name. One she never thought she was going to get, or need, or even imagine. The name of the missing one, the human they thought they lost. “Nice to actually meet you. Or not.”

He’s not human at all.

Ria turns away from Icarus just in time for what little is in her stomach to come up into the grass, burning her throat all the way through.

It’s decidedly an  _ or not. _

There are sirens in the distance for real, now, on top of everything else.

Like she said - it’s not even a question.


	4. The Act of Unmasking

**Monday, June 19th.  
** **Six days after.**

It’s well after midnight by the time he finally gets dragged back inside.

Getting back, or the process it takes to do so, is not one Tarquin would wish on anybody.

Frankly, none of this is stuff he would wish on anybody.

He expects a lack of mercy being acted out towards him in the immediate aftermath, an unfortunate side-effect of intentionally exposing himself, but had little time to prepare himself. His feet still vaguely ache from how hard he hit the ground, but that’s what he gets for maintaining such an upright position. He hasn’t had to drop like that for quite some time.

His arm still hurts, as well. It’s not something he can point out in a time like this, especially when he still hasn’t even figured out exactly what’s wrong with it.

His part is done, now. He got rid of the remainders when no one else had a clear shot. For a while, Soran moves off to deal with the bodies, whatever that entails. Likely make them disappear into thin air. Emmi is blinking at him so intently the entire time that Tarquin doesn’t feel particularly right in trying to get away.

Icarus is sitting blank-faced in the grass, eyes hollow. There are encroaching sirens. Ria isn’t far behind him, on her eyes, focusing exclusively on trying not to throw up again judging by the concentrated look on her face.

No one moves much, besides that, but it’s very quick. Emmi looks like she wants to take him by the shoulders and shake him until all of his screws come loose.

Tarquin wants to do that most days to himself, to be honest.

It’s never been like this. He’s never meant to reveal himself, never  _ wanted  _ to. The desire to end things before they needed to was never a strong one. He liked living each individual life to the fullest before he moved onto his next. There was no doing that now. Tarquin should have ran, already, in the few minutes that no one’s come to grab him. Run and get the fuck out of dodge before he’s expected to stay.

They’re going to expect him to stay.

The bodies are gone when Tarquin looks back. He doesn’t question it. He’s finally learned to not do that after so many years of practice.

Soran essentially scoops Ria out of the grass until she’s back on her own two feet, and waits expectantly for Icarus to do the same. The sirens are getting ever closer. Tarquin can’t just leave them there.

He’s not given a choice about it anyway. Soran grabs him, by his good arm in the very least, and starts pulling him towards the last path that leads down the hill and out of the park. Everyone follows like obedient little soldiers.

A cop car shoots past them on the street and angles towards the park. No one even looks behind them when it stops.

No one speaks, either. The noises of the city still surround them, but it’s as if their voices have been choked off, disappearing along with the bodies.

They’re halfway back, suddenly, and Tarquin can’t do it anymore. “Should I say something?”

Soran is still holding onto him. It’s like he knows Tarquin has already considered running. “Not yet,” he says. Just a matter of time, then.

He’s not sure any of them would have the capacity right now anyway.

They return to the building without issue, which seems shocking but not as shocking as everything that just happened. He just killed two people. Two  _ more  _ people, he should clarify. It’s not as if he hasn’t done it before, time and time again, to keep himself alive and for other more trivial reasons too. He knows how to kill better than he knows how to breathe.

It was all just so sudden. He knew what would happen when he landed, and yet there was no hesitance when he did.

With Tarquin, if he hesitated, he died.

It’s hard to reconcile with the fact that you’re a murderer yet again after so long of trying to shed the title. Even harder now that everyone knows.

And more will, shortly. Soran doesn’t let him go that easily; he marches them all up to the second floor instead of letting Tarquin escape back to his own apartment, and slams his fist against the one door Tarquin wishes he wouldn’t. He doesn’t wait for an answer, either, opening the door and shoving Tarquin inside first.

He knows for a fact that Noelani isn’t a deep sleeper. The darkness of their apartment does not mean he’s safe - they’ll all be up within seconds, if they’re not already.

The hallway light flicks on.

The look on Noelani’s face is heartbreaking in its elation, until she realizes the full extent of the situation, or rather what she doesn’t know. He’s back all of a sudden, and that’s  _ good _ , but nothing is ever that simple and she knows it too.

“Found him,” Soran announces, and finally let’s go. “But he’s not human, so you have that to deal with too.”

She opens her mouth. Closes it again. A few more times of that and she looks like a fish, but he has no energy to make fun of her for it.

In fact, he doesn’t have much energy for anything.

“What?” she settles on, at long last. There are more footsteps coming down the hall. Myra appears too, surprise coloring every inch of her face. Tarquin doesn’t even know how many days it’s been since he last saw them properly. Enough to have concerned them, to think him dead, to wonder if he was just another missing persons case.

They’re all waiting for him to speak. The many words Tarquin queued up while they were walking have vanished. The eloquent explanation, the details… they’re all gone.

He has to find them, too. No one is just going to let this go, and there’s no running now.

He really liked all of this. He really thought he could call it home for a while.

“Well, if you’re not going to stay anything, I’m going the fuck to sleep,” Soran informs them. “Good talk. Kudos on the murder, man. Appreciate it.”

He does sound weirdly appreciative. Almost proud, even? It’s kind of ruined - Noelani’s mouth falls open and stays that way. Myra mutters something foul under her breath.

He departs out the still open door, and Icarus predictably follows. Emmi continues staring.

“I better find out tomorrow,” she says flatly. He nods. She leaves, too. Even if he doesn’t tell anyone outside this room the information will still spread like wildfire. That’s one of the only issues with this place. Nothing is ever a secret forever, no matter how hard you try to hide it.

More footsteps, now. Jahaira, or Topher, or by the looks of the shoes piled next to the door whoever Topher has over. Way too many people.

And they’re all going to know.

Ria is still there, too, smaller than usual. He didn’t think it was possible, but her shoulders are hunched and her arms are wrapped tight around her sides, making her bow forward, eyes on the floor. She has yet to look him in the eye properly since this all went down.

She does now, though. She’s been looking at him like this for days now without knowing.

“Thanks,” she whispers. No matter how soft, he couldn’t have missed it.

Through all of this, he’s reminded that he likely saved her life tonight.

Once she leaves, however, he’s left alone as  _ the  _ quote on quote elephant in the room. Jahaira is out, now, leaving Topher as the only person missing from the room, and they’re all staring at him like he’s a mixture of the best and worst thing they’ve ever laid eyes on.

He is. They just don’t know it yet.

They’re about to, though.

—

It’s an awkward affair.

Tarquin has difficulty moving from the door, initially, at least until Myra comes over and finally shakes him like he’s so sure Emmi wanted to. Noelani tries to speak, by the looks of it, but can’t manage anything good, and eventually just turns around and leaves.

He can’t blame her for that reaction.

Even Jahaira seems absolutely flabbergasted. She’s not talking, for one. Jahaira can talk about literally anything, all day every day.

Myra shakes him until she realizes she’s hurting him. The pain in his arm is only getting worse after his attempt to let it heal for several days.

She eventually puts him in the bathroom without even demanding an explanation. Myra can wait for one; she’s not the pinnacle of patience, but she’s lived long enough to know that she’ll find out eventually. She always does.

So Myra puts him in the bathroom, but leaves immediately after.

Tarquin is waiting for Noelani. No one told him that, outright, but he is. She’s the one that can fix him, and now he has to dig down for his own patience for one of them to coax her out of wherever he’s chased her.

The Tarquin that she knows would be the one getting her out. He’d be there, insistent, a slightly annoying presence that refused to let up until everything was better. For once in his life, he stays put, and waits for someone else to deliver on something he could normally get so much faster. That alone nearly kills him. He doesn’t like being like this - there’s a  _ reason  _ he hides it. This is the version of himself that gets people killed, the one that suffers endlessly and needlessly.

He should take off while he still has the chance. There are only a few things from his apartment that he really needs. All it would take is a minute or two and he could disappear for real this time. No one would have to worry, or wonder, or suffer anymore.

Noelani opens the door, expressionless.

So much for that.

She holds up her hand before he even attempts to speak, so he doesn’t bother trying. That’s not what she wants right now, so he won’t give it to her. She nudges him until he slips off the edge of the bathtub and chooses a spot on the floor instead, so that she can sit in his abandoned spot, hands held out expectantly.

She’s going to fix this, and they’re not going to talk. That’s what it looks like, anyway. He rolls his sleeve up all the way so she can take hold of his arm, draping it over her lap, and she gets to work.

He doesn’t know what she’s going to do. Tarquin doesn’t even know what’s wrong. It just got too close. It was burning apart, shrapnel raining down around him. Transforming had seemed like the obvious option. Smaller targets were safer, harder to hit, and he tended to heal quicker and better like that anyway. If only it had actually  _ worked.  _ Now he was just sitting here with shrapnel in his arm anyway, feeling an awful lot like he was just shoved into the naughty corner.

It doesn’t help that Noelani’s digging around in his arm with a set of tweezers, by the feel of it. Apparently she found the shrapnel.

He can hardly see her face obscured by the bright curtain of hair but he’s trying, okay?

Tarquin needs to do something.

“Tengu,” he says, forcing himself not to choke on the world. “That’s the technical name for… what I am.”

Her eyes flicker up to his and return to the task at hand just as quickly. He keeps going.

“Around the time when I was born it was really bad,” he tells her. “ _ They  _ were all bad. Killing people, robbing people, possessing them. Wreaking havoc everywhere they went. I just had to follow along. That’s what we were. It changed, over time, but the damage was done. Every time we tried to do some good or protect something it got flipped on its head. No one trusts us and nobody ever will.”

And that’s why it’s easier to pick up and run in the end. If nobody has to know, the damage can never be done. He won’t ruin anyone’s life again. He won’t turn it to shambles trying to do something good.

“I can control the wind,” he explains further. “Sometimes the storms, but not always. It gets a little difficult if they’re out of control. That bird that Ria was carrying around, that was me. All of it is just too much sometimes, and I….”

He trails off, unintentionally. Noelani is openly staring at him now, but she’s not so well-versed in keeping her face neutral as he is.

The tweezers aren’t even in his arm anymore. He didn’t even notice. His pain tolerance is beyond a normal point.

“Where  _ were  _ you born, exactly?” she asks. He got words out of her. He can’t very well let that go.

Tarquin swallows. “1296.”

There is no grand reaction. She really is a marvel, sometimes. She looks very deeply troubled, but other than that not much else.

“So you’re telling me I could have had a best friend for the past seven hundred years or so and instead we’re sitting here, doing it like this?” she asks.

He laughs weakly. It’s better than nothing. “Yeah,” he says. “Sorry.”

The tweezers dig back into his arm. He thinks there’s a bit of burnt skin there, too, but it feels like Noelani isn’t being quite so harsh anymore. From the beginning he could have just come to her and asked, avoided all of this, and been on his merry way.

He’s a murderer and a coward, too.

“I get the feeling you think you’re a very bad, irredeemable person,” she guesses, flattening her free hand over his mouth before he even opens it. “Listen to me. You may think that, but I know  _ you _ , and the you that I know isn’t as far off from this one as you may think, okay? Whatever you did tonight, it doesn’t matter. Most of us have done worse.”

Her hand muffles it, but it’s not so quiet that she can’t hear. “You haven’t.”

“I’ve done plenty of bad,” she protests, dropping her hand. “And I thought you were dead, so for right now I’m just going to focus on the fact that you’re not. Are you okay with that?”

That can’t just be it. No one is ever just okay with something like that, not as awful as he is. Eventually Noelani will question what it is he did tonight, if half the building doesn’t know by tomorrow anyway. She’ll know, they all will, and that will be the end for him. They’ll get rid of him themselves if he doesn’t pack up immediately.

“Tarquin,” Noelani prompts, turning his chin to face her. “I’m serious.”

She is, he can tell, but that doesn’t make it any better. Her lowers his forehead onto her knee when she goes to pull the last of the shrapnel out.

The door opens and cracks into his legs before he has the frame of mind to move them; the tweezers jab deeper into his skin, and it’s the first time anything actually hurts.

Topher pokes his head into the bathroom, seemingly without a care in the world. “Oh, Myra was serious?” he asks. “I didn’t think you would actually be in here.”

He’s towing a very concerned looking Damas on his heels, who typically looks very concerned anyway. It appears he was right on the assessment of there being someone else around, but thankfully he seems to be the only one.

“Surprise,” he manages. Noelani pulls the tweezers out for good.

“What happened?”

“Nothing, Toph,” Noelani insists. “Go back to bed.”

“But —”

“I’ll kill you.”

“Okay,  _ Cain _ .” His whole heaves with a dramatic sigh as he turns to go, leaving Damas silhouetted in the now dark hall, staring at the two of them. At least he listened this time. Topher isn’t so inclined most of the time.

“Sorry for waking you up,” Noelani says. Damas somehow looks very young and a thousand years old all at once, making his face most of the time completely unreadable. His hands are clenched in his pockets, though, something uncertain and confused to them that doesn’t transfer easily to the rest of his face.

“Are you… okay?” Damas asks. Tarquin doesn’t think he’s ever been directly addressed by him.

He offers him a thumbs up with his free, uninjured arm, and a smile to go along with it just to make him feel better. His left leg hurts on top of everything else too, and he suspects Noelani made him bleed a bit when she all but shanked him with the tweezers.

Tarquin’s okay, sure, but not quite fine.

He never is.

He stretches out and kicks the door closed the second Damas departs, making sure this time that it actually closes properly. Noelani dabs at something on his arm. Definitely blood. This was never going to be the place to hide no matter how long he tried. Even if he kept it a secret past tonight, it would have gotten out eventually.

At least now he knows. He won’t try so hard in the future, his next life. Everything can just be.

“Can you do one thing for me?” Noelani murmurs. 

He props his chin back on her knee. “What?”

“Don’t sit out on the fire escape anymore.”

It’s almost laughable. He can’t quite manage to get it out, only a small smile surfacing in its place. It doesn’t last very long - Noelani typically works in silence, now being no exception, and he’s left to his own devices, his own head.

He’s not even that tired. You think he would be after so long, so many mistakes.

He closes his eyes, even though he doesn’t sleep, and hears the sound of gunshots echoing over and over in his skull, sees the spray of blood behind his closed eyelids.

It’s all he sees, these days.

—

Noelani doesn’t let him out of her eyesight that entire day, but finally lets him go the next.

By then, everyone knows.

He’s not sure who spreads it. Who first asks. Who tells who.

Tarquin doesn’t want to know, either.

Avoidance is a thing he’s learned time and time again. When someone finally comes knocking the afternoon of the twentieth he goes crawling out his window, even though Noelani warned him not to, and heads back to the roof. Takes the stairs all the way down to the ground floor, and then just… leaves.

Not permanently. Not yet.

He at least has to go back to the theater, though, and it’s a good way to avoid whoever’s looking for answers back at the building. He has unanswered texts from  _ three  _ of them - Roxy was predictable, at least, but there are two others who he doesn’t even remember giving his number to. Their names are saved in his phone, though. It happened at some point.

They all sound so concerned now matter how many times he reads them over. According to his calendar, there are three possible sessions at the theater that he could have missed. He always calls when he’s not going to be there.

They probably thought something had happened too.

The place is busy enough when he arrives that he doesn’t become the center of attention, but he spots one of them, Finn, quick enough, lingering at the side of the room with a gaggle of other people he doesn’t know.

It’s the easiest way to get out unscathed.

“Hey, man,” Finn says. “Thought you died or something.”

It’s a joke, the epitome of one, the sound and feel and the way it’s delivered. That’s half of what they’re about here. Jokes.

“Sorry,” he apologizes, plastering a smile on his face. “Wasn’t feeling too well for a few days.”

It’s not a lie. His arm still hurts, even. Whatever Noelani can do is nowhere close to an instant fix, and apparently Soran isn’t in the mood to give him on after what he put him through. Not that Tarquin’s asked. That would take more courage than the amount he currently possesses.

“I just wanted to tell someone face to face - I’m leaving,” he announces. “Sorry for the lack of warning, but…”

“Leaving?” Finn asks. “You moving?”

He nods. That’s what it feels like. He just hasn’t decided where yet. Once he does, that’s the nail in the coffin, and it’s something he’s been avoiding since yesterday.

“Everything okay?” Finn continues. Tarquin is nodding again too fast. He knows it looks artificial, and judging by the look he gets from Finn, as well as the strangers surrounding them, it’s nowhere near convincing enough to be believable.

He used to be such a good liar. He has no idea what’s happened to him.

Too much, in the very least.

“Fine,” he lies. “Just wanted to let you know. Tell everyone else for me?”

“Sure thing. Stay in touch, hey?”

And that’s it. It feels like a clean break, the band-aid ripped off. He doesn’t have any guilt following him around now for leaving without explanation. Finn will tell everyone and that will be that.

He departs with a wave. A few offer them one back, despite him being unfamiliar with them all, and Finn’s is half-hearted at best. His eyes continue to betray his internal bewilderment at the entire situation until Tarquin is out the door and can no longer feel the look at his back following him out.

That’s one thing down. Now he just has to get everything together, work through all the notifications on his phone for good, and then decide where he’s going.

The next thing that pops up is almost enough to make him smile. It’s so intrinsically them, until it really hits him.

This is real.

_ jaybird changed Tarquin (413)’s name to The Filthy Liar in 413 _

He’s not wrong on that front. The opposite really.

Tarquin may be a lot of things, but most of all he’s a liar, and it’s something he’s always embraced.

If only it wasn’t ruining his life now.

—

He spends the next twelve hours looking, and even when he sleeps it’s as if ideas are still floating around in his brain.

There are so many places Tarquin could go. So maybe he hasn’t seen yet. He likes staying, you see. He was never one for running a few days after he arrived. He could make a home for a few years, abandon it before things got too suspicious, and then go back a hundred years later if he liked it a little too much. Everyone he knew would be dead by then.

He wouldn’t be able to come back to San Francisco, not ever.

At the end of the day it’s all going to whittle down to what plane ticket he settles on, because no amount of research will provide him with one answer over another. It’s not like he can ask anyone, either.

He still has the tabs up on his open laptop when Noelani shows up the next morning with an eager Jahaira on her heels, and he closes every one of them in a panic.

It can wait until later. That’s what he keeps telling himself.

Later.

“So.. this is why this place is so empty,” Noelani assumes once he lets her in. “No personal belongings.”

“Move too much,” he explains. And he’ll do it again and again and again until the day he dies. As long as he has to. As long as he’s still breathing.

Noelani is working on her own opinions, but Jahaira bumps her shoulder into his. Suffice to say, she looks positively  _ jazzed.  _ “This is fucking awesome,” she decides. “You too, I still can’t believe it. All we need is Nic, I guess.... that would be even better.”

Nic, who’s dead, a fact he could say aloud now with letter repercussions.

He doesn’t.

Noelani’s looking at him like she wants him to finally unpack, empty all the boxes spread out across the apartment. Jahaira is looking at him like she wants to upend them all until she discovers all of his deepest secrets.

Tarquin doesn’t want to do either.

They’re both ancient, too. Jahaira is far, far older. Yet they’ve both managed relatively normal lifestyles, finding a home in places that look relaxed and lived in. They make long-lasting friendships. They’re happy. Tarquin does not have such fortune and doesn't know if he ever will. So far he hasn’t been that lucky.

“I’m still mad at you,” Noelani says, turning to fix him with a look that appears nothing of the sort. “Just so you know.”

“I know.” Somehow even despite her attempt at neutrality he feels like a recently disciplined school-child who was just sent off to the naughty corner. “Love you too.”

She smiles. It almost feels like it makes everything better, even just for a second.

“Okay, but  _ please  _ tell me you have some sort of weird, ancient relic in here that none of us had any clue about,” Jahaira says, voice unable to contain her true excitement. She’s already eyeing the boxes as if she’s decided mentally which one she’s going to pick through first, and he wouldn’t put it past her one bit. Patience and composure are not virtues, and are also not things she happens to share with Myra.

“Some things,” he admits, taking a few steps towards his room. Jahaira practically skips after him, bouncing on the balls of her feet when he stops at the first box tucked behind the door. This one is mostly books, which is why it was perfect to hide something. No one would ever think to look.

He rummages around for one of the kunai in the far bottom of the box and offers it to her hilt first, balancing the blade on his fingers. “Not so much for stabbing. Mostly climbing. Though you  _ could  _ stab someone with it if you had the intent and nothing else to work with.”

Noelani leans against the doorframe while Jahaira ooh’s and aah’s over it, attempting and failing instantly to try and spin it through her fingers by the loop on the bottom. “Or if you were desperate enough,” she observes. Time has worn it down even further, but she’s correct.

And Tarquin  _ has  _ been desperate enough.

There’s more expected out of this, though. One thing is not satisfactory. He knows he has plenty of others. He has money stashed, duct taped to the bottom of the dining room table in case he couldn’t make it to a bank. Shuriken somewhere, he knows, but he hasn’t seen them in some time. They’re probably lost between the pages of a few of his books. The mask that he buries beneath everything else he has and refuses to look at but can’t bring himself to get rid of.

He has one thing that would curb her enthusiasm for now, and definitely turn away their interest towards anything else for at least a little bit. He waves Jahaira back to the turn, taking the kunai back from her hand, and counts the floorboards across the room until he finds the eighth one, leaning down to pry it up. It wasn’t even loose when he got here, and it had taken some work, but it was time well spent.

And now here he was, throwing it out into the open eight floorboards over because he thought one lucky number would help him.

Evidently not.

The staff is longer than he is tall, and so dark that it’s nearly lost in the shadows of the empty floor. It takes some work to angle out because he hasn’t had to since he got here. Tarquin doesn’t even let himself look at it unless he has to.

This feels like a betrayal to himself. He was never meant to be in the open, let alone anything that belonged to him.

Both of their eyes widen when he brings the staff to its full height, flat on the ground, but it doesn’t make him feel anything good. Just more sick by the second as the metal rings encircling the top loop rattle and shake. It’s done so much damage in the past and he senses it doing more now.

“You could totally brain someone with that,” Jahaira says. “You’re seriously a certified fucking  _ badass  _ and didn’t tell anyone.”

It’s a compliment coming from her, and he knows it. Coming from someone who can turn others to stone with just a look, it was certainly intended as one from the beginning.

Noelani cocks her head. Inside he’s almost begging to be asked. Someone deserves to know how many have died as a result of this thing.

He already knows she isn’t going to, the same way she won’t ask about what happened a few nights ago.

Noelani is dangerous, too, but she’s not a cold-blooded murderer and she’s not going to start now. Why would she want to interact with one, either, let alone attempt to continue calling one her closest friend?

He wants nothing more than to put the staff back beneath the floor but feels he can’t, now, letting it rest against the bed-frame instead. He toes the floorboard back into place.

“Why do you need things to climb with if you can turn into a bird?” Jahaira asks randomly, everything else already forgotten.

“Subtlety.”

A sudden, genuine smile appears on Noelani’s face. “Because you’re the pinnacle of  _ subtlety _ ,” she says, eyeing the staff. “Right.”

He was until a few days ago. No one knew. They couldn’t claim to. He hid the staff beneath the floor because it was obvious the same way the sword Noelani kept openly in her room was. Anyone could see it. Anyone could put two and two together. People here weren’t  _ dumb. _

Apparently he was, though. It’s not so much of a surprise as it is deep-seated, annoyed resignation.

He shouldn’t have ever thought he could stay. Something in him had been tempted with the prospect of a family no matter how different they were, people who could understand him and take him in anyway despite the things they know.

That feels like what they’re trying to do, but he can’t trust it. He can’t trust much, in this world, and so he won’t. Not unless the world earns it first.

In his experience, it doesn’t try. All he has to do is pick a place within it and go, start over again, take his mask and make another life for himself.

He’s done it enough times. These days it’s not even that difficult.

It’s for that reason that he can’t understand why this one hurts so bad.

—

It ends up being a random decision.

He’s seen so many places that most days, they are. Tarquin doesn’t care where he goes so long as he ends up there.

So Granada, Spain it is. He speaks enough Spanish to get through and then learn the rest when he gets there. He chooses the quickest flight, not the cheapest by far, but the one that allows for the littlest amount of time for anyone to try and track him down. A few hours in Chicago, another plane, and then he’ll be over the Atlantic. He’ll be  _ gone. _

That’s the way it should be.

He’s been to Spain. Never lived there. It’ll be safe enough, for the time being.

Tarquin thinks he should do something after he books the ticket. Tell someone. Go talk to someone about something completely unrelated. The other four haven’t even made an attempt since that night.

Soran’s not going to choke anything out of him, not when people have been doing the same thing to him for so very long. Icarus is likely too scared to try, even if his curiosity is trying to take the wheel. Emmi still has something going on; they were after her, he remembers. It’s not something he can forget. Part of him wants to ask. A larger part is chastising him for even considering it. You get attached to someone’s problems, you get attached to them.

And then you stay. Enough of him already wants to, so he can’t very well make it worse.

He spends the day after Noelani and Jahaira leave and most of the next, until the sun is almost down, wrangling every single belonging he has together. He makes sure the payment for the flight goes through and then drains his bank account, cutting all of his cards into pieces. He wipes away every single piece of information tying him to this life and then everything down in the apartment, too. He won’t even leave a fingerprint here if he has a say in it.

The less he leaves, the better. That’s less to miss, less to remember, less to think about.

Like he said - a clean break. He’s all about those these days.

The sad part is he doesn’t even have that many boxes. Getting through all of this isn’t just about mental compartmentalization; Tarquin learned how to live light long ago, and made sure no matter what that wherever he ended up he knew exactly what companies would ship a dozen boxes or so wherever he ended up next. That was really all he needed - that, and a roll of duct tape to close everything once again. A destination address helped, usually, but he wasn’t that far in the process yet. He would figure it out. He had a layover in Chicago. He could look into housing then.

For now it was just about getting out. Once he was sure no one would catch him, later on, he was going to load up all of the boxes, and then tomorrow morning he could head for the airport.

No one would be any the wiser, just the way it was meant to be.

And then the duct tape, of all things, ruins it. He’s halfway through taping up the very last box, and it’s so loud he misses the door opening.

That’s what he gets, isn’t it? For trusting.

He blinks, crouched and half-concealed behind the box, and Ria blinks back at him. She looks at the door.

“I was supposed to knock,” she guesses. For all the intelligence in the world, it seems to be the simple things that get the most. “Should I…?”

“You don’t have to go back out,” he tells her, easing off his heels and properly onto the floor. He’s already been caught red-handed, if she understands what she’s seeing. There’s no need to delay the inevitable simply by teaching her the very simple human value behind  _ knocking.  _

She’s looking at the boxes, and at him, and at the apartment too, it’s vast emptiness even in such a relatively small space. She fits in it well. If it wasn’t for the shockingly white hair and practically neon blue eyes you would not think anything of her here, not as an outsider.

Tarquin sort of feels like one, still, so maybe that’s why she fits.

It’s awful, because he hasn’t talked to her since, and hasn't really talked to her in the first place outside of that first and only thank-you, but he wants to. And he can’t.

“Are you leaving?” she asks finally. She gently nudges one of the boxes, the one closest to her, with a foot that’s clad in a sock far too big for her.

She didn’t even come up here with shoes on. Why did she come up here at all?

Emmi may indeed be correct in her assumption that Ria hasn’t told them everything, if she suddenly has a sixth sense.

“Tomorrow morning,” he concedes, getting to his feet. He finishes up the last of the tape, and the noise suddenly is far too loud. It feels good not to lie for once, especially when there’s no use in it. She can already see what he’s doing.

She takes another step in. The door is still open. He hates the feeling that it’s open because she’s leaving an opportunity to run, if she has to.

He’s usually the one running.

“Why?” she asks.

He shrugs. “That’s how it works. Usually I leave  _ before  _ someone around me finds out, but this time I didn’t have much of a choice.”

“You didn’t?”

“Looking down on it gave me a different perspective. One of you was going to die. I didn’t know who. It didn’t matter.”

Saving lives instead of ending them. That’s his thing now, right? He saved them, he thinks, and now he’s going to save them further by leaving. They won’t become collateral because of him and all the things he drags along behind him, inevitably. Tarquin couldn’t live with that guilt on top of everything else.

Good people or not, everyone here deserves to live without meddling, without consequence. He is both of those things.

He’s not good for anyone.

“Why… why is that how it works, though?” Ria questions, wrapping her arms around herself. It doesn’t look like she wanted to make this effort anymore than he wants her in here.

Unless he does. Unless she came down here willingly, no arguments with herself necessary.

Unless everything is changing all around him.

“After a few hundred years or so, it becomes a habit,” he replies. “It’s easier to live a new life than to get so involved with one you can’t claw your way out of it.”

“Why do you need to get out of this one?”

So many questions, so little time to answer them. All of them coming out of her mouth are curiously guileless, which he thinks is the only thing  _ innocent  _ about her. A face can hide a lot of things, but not everything.

He would know. He looks at one of them in the mirror every single day.

But she’s said the one thing he didn’t want to hear, though. What he hadn’t considered. Why does he feel the need to leave so strongly now? He could hurt them, yes. Something attached to him could. Aren’t these people here, though, better equipped to deal with it than any other? Could he finally have the best of it all?

Tarquin wants it so badly his chest constricts whenever he even thinks about it. Breathing becomes difficult.

He never wanted to leave this. Deep down, he always knew that.

Now she’s just exposing it.

“You don’t need to leave,” she says quietly. “I don’t think… I know nobody wants you to.”

“You speak for everyone now?”

“Just me,” she murmurs. “But I don’t think you should.”

“My first actual introduction to you was me shooting two people in the head, and you want me to stay?”

“That’s not… technically how it went,” she surmises. “They killed themselves.”

“That’s what we’ll call it, yeah,” he says, giving in only because it’s so much easier. Suicide. Two people died because he invaded their bodies and made them do it, but that’s what they’ll choose instead. Another fucking lie.

“Is it easy?” she asks. He knows what she’s addressing.

“Easier than I’d like it to be.”

“And is leaving easy, too?”

She’s killing him. That is what’s happening here, whether she means to or not. This tiny little alien who carried him around on her arm for several days is going to unintentionally guilt trip him into staying.

Is it really feeling guilty when he never wanted to leave in the first place?

“If you do leave,” she says. “Thanks, again.”

There should be more. He wants there to be. “You’re welcome.”

And yet there isn’t. She hesitates, only for a moment, before she exits the apartment and closes the door behind her. He’s still on the floor surrounded by his boxes, an empty roll of tape that he just wasted perched on his knee.

He’s still there come midnight, too, legs aching from their very same, hours long position. His head is in his hands for most of the time while he tries to talk himself out of it. It doesn’t work, predictably. Nothing ever does anymore.

Tarquin gets up. Throws the empty roll out. Kicks all the boxes to the side of the room and curses their very existence, as well as his own.

And then he cancels the plane ticket.


	5. The Dead Don't Always Die

**Saturday, June 24th.** **  
****Eleven days after.**

Emmi is transformed, and it’s not into anything good.

She’s a haggard shell, a walking corpse, something with a heart pumping away and a brain trying to receive signals and nothing more.

That would normally add up to quite a bit, but not anymore.

The amount of hours she’s slept in the past several days has not been enough to keep a regular human going. It’s a good thing she’s not one, first of all, but she’s not completely inhuman either. She can’t go without for much longer than she already has.

Emmi has no solution for this, though. Nobody does because nobody _knows_.

They were after her. She knew it the second shit went down, and the others heard it. It happened, it’s real, and this time if she gets caught they’re taking more than her arm. They wanted to take more than that last time, too. They’re not going to leave without her head once again. That’s verging too much on a failure for their liking.

It’s by some miracle that these ones weren’t well-trained, not like the ones she’s encountered before. Perhaps the Collection Agency is running out of options, or maybe Emmi is just getting smarter.

It doesn’t feel like she is, though. The opposite, actually. Everyone in this building is so painfully fucking _dumb_ that it’s spreading like a disease and latching onto all of her veins, poisoning her from the inside out.

She liked everything much better when she wasn’t being poisoned.

She knows that everyone is wondering, Arwen most of all. That’s what a significant other is supposed to do. Care, worry, help in all matters. Arwen is not a stereotypical significant other by any means, but she’s still doing it all.

Her job would be made much easier if she wasn’t.

Emmi’s not helping any. She doesn’t linger in bed in the mornings. She doesn’t let the two of them get left alone in a room. She goes to sleep first and fakes it even if Arwen comes in not long after, so she doesn’t ask. So they don’t _talk._ Emmi learned all of the finest avoidance tactics years ago, and is finally getting use out of them.

She gets up even earlier than usual. Someone has been stomping about in the halls anyway, and it’s not like she was sleeping to begin with. The walls in this place aren’t thin enough.

Her heart won’t let her, either. Her heart has refused her a lot of things in her life.

It’s just that there’s fear in her now, fear that ha been quelled and put away for a very long time until now. For a while, it went away whenever she looked Arwen in the eye.

Back now, and fierce as ever, she almost forgets already what it was like to not feel it.

It fuels her to open the door, though, when the stomping keeps up for another twenty minutes even after she finally crawls out of bed. Fear is adrenaline even when you don’t want it to be.

Of all the people, Emmi doesn’t expect to find Trojan when she opens the door, namely because he’s got no business being here at this hour. He pauses halfway past the door, giving her a drawn-out look, before he heads back for the door once again.

“What are you doing?” she asks after him.

“Nothing.”

“Doesn’t look like nothing,” she comments. Another good thing to find: distractions. They do the trick like nothing else. For a second, once she finds one, she can allow everything else to fade away and give her some peace.

If it’s been him stomping around this whole time, though, he’s on a mission. For whatever reason.

Normally with Trojan she wouldn’t question it. But for now, the distraction is working.

“You looking for something?” she asks.

“So what if I am?”

“Want help?”

“Absolutely the fuck not,” he responds. It wasn’t even a genuine offer, really, but sometimes riling Trojan up is too difficult to pass on, so long as you don’t get his truly nasty side. He strides back for the elevator just in time for Soran to emerge from the door to their left. A lengthy staredown ensues as Trojan presses the down button, and then Soran presses the up, presumably just to fuck with him. Trojan attempts to trip him as he passes, to no avail.

“You sure?” she asks again.

“Leaving now.”

“For good?” Soran questions. “We can only hope.”

Trojan slams on the down button a few more times until the elevator dings up. “Hopefully,” he says, before the door closes. They all wish, but it won’t happen, not so long as they’re trying. Only when they least expect it, around here. At least that much is consistent.

“What are you up here for, now?” she asks, watching Soran walk by. He had looked at her with some amount of purpose, like he came up here for her at first…

What if he had? Should she run?

“One second,” he urges, making his way to the window. “Just let me make sure he’s leaving for real.”

“I think he is,” she says, but stays put at the door. Soran can stay on Trojan watch by himself, for all she cares. “What does it matter?”

“Stop asking questions. Don’t you have enough to worry about, anyway?” he asks. “Like who’s fucking hunting you?”

“Shut the fuck up,” she hisses, glancing behind her for signs of life, though she knows there aren’t any. “Don’t say that again.”

“Why not?” he asks, something cheeky to his voice now. It flees the premises when he turns around to come back to her. “Are you telling me no one knows? Arwen? Anyone?”

“Shut up,” she repeats. He didn’t think anything of it, but now as he realizes the direness of the situation, some of the seriousness has come back to him. Not that he has much normally, but seeing it now is almost sort of relieving.

He’s one of the few that knows, and he’s asking. For so long it’s as if she’s been crying out for help and no one’s been listening.

Can she take it though? Worse, can she trust it?

“Been there, done that,” he says. “I know what it’s like. Is this a new development, or a constant thing?”

“Why are you even up here?” she sighs. She can’t get into this right now, and isn’t even sure she wants to. It’s too much, all of it. Emmi has barely wrapped her head around Tarquin, or the fact that it happened at all. Saying everything aloud will make her spiral, and she can’t afford that right now. She’s already so close to the edge.

“Well, I was going to bug you about your problems, but now I’m going to snoop around Trojan’s.” He offers the information up so readily that she can’t help but blink. Since when does Soran _care_? What has Icarus done to him?

Actually scratch that. She doesn’t want to know.

Just like that, he’s leaving. She stares at his retreating back until he opens the door, looking back at her. “Want to come with, so I can snoop and also bug you at the same time?”

Emmi’s already reaching back in for her keys. “Why are you snooping?” she asks, hurrying after him. It’s another distraction. That’s all she’s telling herself.

It will be good for her, and definitely won’t run her into any more trouble.

“Because I have a feeling and I want to investigate it.”

“Since when do you have feelings at all?” she wonders, and he stops so suddenly on the landing that she runs into him. She smiles when he glares at her.

It’s her first genuine smile in days, it feels like.

Her question goes unanswered as they head down to the first floor together. He doesn’t respond, and he also doesn’t bug. She watches on dutifully as he produces something out of his pocket that unravels the lock on Trojan’s door in a few tragic seconds. All the while she stands there, clad in pajamas, stuck out like a sore thumb as she waits for him to open the door, and when he does he ushers her in so fast that she hardly has time to process it.

He locks the door, too. Smart. They’ll have ample warning if he comes back. Trojan really will go all horrifying berserker on them if he finds them in here, and Emmi’s not in the mood for it. She’s also not in the mood to die, either.

She very rarely is, you see. Why do you think she runs at the pace she does?

“What are we looking for, exactly?” she asks. Soran’s chosen destination is the bathroom, leaving her in the grungy openness of the combined living room and kitchen. She expected nothing less from Trojan, really.

“Anything out of place.”

So this whole apartment, really? Nobody else here lives in such squalor. She didn’t think it was entirely possibly for someone to give this little of a fuck about their living arrangements, but at least now she understands why Mal refused to live with him in the early days. Anyone in their right mind would do the same.

The kitchen looks busier than anywhere else. Emmi runs a hand through the few things left on the counter closest to her. A few bills, stray change, wrappers that belong in the damn garbage. Whatever she catches from this place Soran is going to be paying for.

There are more bills in the first drawer she opens along with a collection of random garbage - assorted pens, loose coins, gum that she suspects is probably older than Trojan is.

“So, how long have you been getting hunted?” Soran asks. Apparently his search of the bathroom was fruitless.

“Aren’t we supposed to be investigating… something?”

“Sure, but I’m also supposed to be bugging you.”

Emmi allows a lengthy sigh to escape, betraying her irritation at the whole situation. That’s better than her fear being known. She _had_ been scared in the moment despite herself. Soran asked her to go after one, so she had. She would have gone after them all if no one else had been there to help her. That was what was required of her to survive.

It was just so _hard_ though, which at least was something Soran understood. Very different contexts, here, but he got it. It was difficult to live when you had so much working against you.

Most people said that death came for them too quick, but Emmi couldn’t help but wonder if the opposite was true. Perhaps it wasn’t coming for her, them, quick enough.

Soran shoulders her aside none too gently, something she’s come to expect from him, and picks up the sheath of papers tucked into the back of the drawer.

“Found something good?” she wonders. It has to be something for him to have given up on her so fast. She wrenches his arm down until the papers are at a more appropriate level for them both. “What are interment rights?”

Something something Olivet Memorial Park, it reads. A cemetery, judging by the letterhead. That doesn’t sit comfortably in her gut. There’s a whole lot of mumbo-jumbo, all of which Soran actually appears to be reading judging by his furrowed eyebrows.

“Not the actual land, but the right to be buried there,” he explains. “I think. Like what happens when most people pre-plan their own funerals so nobody else has to do it during the fact.”

She hums. “I’m not going to Trojan’s funeral.”

“Would anyone?”

“You might, to deface his grave,” she assumes, and Soran nods thoughtfully. She wouldn’t put it past him.

Realistically, though, there’s no way Trojan cares about death, and certainly not where someone was going to dump him if he happened to bite it. He’d be _dead_ , no point in caring then. That only leaves the explanation that it’s for someone else, though, which is the real reason her stomach is rolling.

“You could put someone else there, hey?” she asks. “You have the right to decide.”

“Correct.”

Soran flips through the next few papers. Trojan’s signature is even on one of them, messy scrawl on the bottom clear as day. Emmi doesn’t have the energy to read through it all right now, but something is off. Soran’s paused again - presumably something new has caught his attention, but she’s still stuck. Aren’t grave plots fucking _expensive_ , to boot, and isn’t Trojan infamously broke?

“Isn’t,” she starts, but Soran swivels and slaps the papers over her mouth. A moment later, she hears noise out in the hall.

Oh, no.

“Hold it for a few extra seconds,” Soran commands. She has no idea what that’s supposed to mean, but she watches the lock begin to turn on the door and then snap back shut as soon as she looks.

His stupid fucking spirits won’t be able to hold the lock forever, though, not against someone with a _key._

Soran stuffs the entire bundle of papers into his jacket and then drags her down the hall and into the bathroom, shutting the door almost all the way. She’s climbing up onto the back of the toilet before he even tells her to. The window is propped open a few inches, and that’s their only escape. There’s a loose screw on the edge of the windowsill. She didn’t think these windows opened, and she’s correct - what is Trojan’s _deal_ these days?

He holds the window up as far as it can go while she wiggles out, hitting the concrete of the parking lot’s edge with a dull thud. She reaches back up to yank him out after her, paying him no mind when he goes tumbling to the ground at her feet. Emmi lowers the window back down to the appropriate width and drops to the ground the second she hears distant footsteps in the hall.

She slumps to the ground at Soran’s side, who’s already yanked the papers back out of his jacket. “I hate you so much,” she informs him, scratching out a few pieces of gravel out of her elbow. “What are you looking at?”

He’s read the same thing over a few times now. She can see it in the flickers of his eyes.

“What?” she repeats. Trojan could hear her through the window; Emmi finds she doesn’t care.

Soran turns the paper to her, almost mechanically slow, something robotic to the movement of his arm. The last page is half-blank, and the top half is filled by a photocopy of a cheque. Some of the lettering is hard to read - Trojan’s name on the recipient line, for one, the date landing somewhere in mid-March, and the amount of five thousand has been slightly faded in the transfer.

What hasn’t, though, is the name indicating where the check came from. Because it’s Myra’s.

She looks at Soran. He looks back.

“That’s probably not good, is it?” he asks. Emmi shakes her head.

No. No, it definitely isn’t.

—

Emmi gets another sleepless night, but this one is different.

Her fixation has changed.

Soran refuses to give her the papers. In fact, he sends her on her merry way and tells her he’ll “deal with it” whatever the fuck that even means. How can he deal with something when he doesn’t know what he’s even dealing with?

She doesn’t know, either, so there’s no use in fixating on it.

She’s still going to, though.

Arwen drags her off for a nap halfway throughout the day, but she doesn’t nap at all. She can’t leave, either, because Arwen has an arm wrapped around her, and for once she’s so warm that Emmi almost doesn’t _want_ to move. It leaves her alone with her thoughts while Arwen dozes on her shoulder, at least until Mal knocks and pokes his head in without waiting for an answer.

She still can’t move. Arwen mumbles something nonsensical and possibly not even English into her shoulder and holds on even tighter.

“I wanna talk to you,” Mal requests. It’s clear who he’s addressing here. She squeezes Arwen’s hand where it’s slotted in-between the dips of her ribs.

“I’ll come right back,” she promises. One length, disgruntled sigh later, Arwen releases her. The one time she was considering not moving for a long while, and she can’t even get that.

Emmi slips into the hall, closing the door behind her. “What’s up?”

“Nothing’s up. Why does something have to be up for me to want to talk to you?”

Upon receiving a very flat stare in response, Mal heaves almost as dramatic of a sigh as Arwen did. “Just tell me what’s going on.”

“With what?”

“Don’t play _stupid_ ,” he hisses. “Whatever happened out there a few nights ago, it was bad, wasn’t it? Nobody knows because none of you are fucking telling anyone.”

“Have you ever considered we’re not telling you for a reason?” she asks.

“If the reason is you’re all fucking _stupid_ ,” he repeats, leaning in closer. “Then sure. But no one seems as rattled as you. Not even the fucking alien, or Tarquin, who’s apparently killing people now—”

Emmi doesn’t want to deal with this now. Mal’s a lot to deal with most of the time, and with this being so uncommon for him it’s even worse. On top of that he’s reminding her of a completely lifeless body, walking around and pulling the trigger, both on someone else and themselves. Two bullets straight to the brain. Emmi feels like she should have blood all over her but there’s never any to be found.

“Why do you care?” she interrupts. He’s still on a tangent, one he doesn’t even seem to understand himself. Mal is not a tangent guy, either. Mr. Unseelie Court usually has one evil retort, sometimes two, and then it’s over. Conversation done, just like that.

“Am I not allowed to?”

“Did Jupiter force you into asking?”

“Jupiter did not fucking _force me_ ,” he insists. “I’m worried. Is that what you want to hear? Arwen’s worried. Jupiter is worried.”

“Is Percy worried?” She hasn’t even seen him for two days. It’s up in the air if he’s still living here or on a bench installed on the sidewalk outside of the police station.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“You’re telling me Percy doesn’t care, but you do?”

“Look, whatever this is, it’s not just you,” Mal reminds her. As if she doesn’t know. “If something’s happening, you know it’s only a matter of time until it comes back out.”

“And the truth comes out,” she mutters. “There’s your self-preservation instinct kicking in. I’ll make sure not to get you killed when the time comes.”

“You know damn well I don’t care about myself,” he retorts. He used to, when she first met him. That was before him and Jupiter were attached at the hip, though, months before she met Arwen. They may not have coerced him, but at the end of the day he really is asking for Jupiter. Mal wants something to happen to them about as much as Emmi does.

That’s to say, not at all. They already lost Nic. Jupiter’s next on the list of people who absolutely don’t deserve even a second of this shit.

The temptation to let everything spill out is so strong it nearly overwhelms her. Someone would finally know. Better yet, Mal would _help_. She’s nowhere close to his first priority, but he would.

That’s why they’re here right now.

Emmi forces away the lump in her throat. “Well, I’m not telling you,” she maintains, and hates herself all the more for it.

“Tell me that everything is okay, then.”

She presses her lips together, straightens out her face. Her phone buzzes in her pocket and she doesn’t even allow a reaction. Mal’s eyes flicker down to it, though, a betrayal of his normally very hardened mask.

Someone’s more affected by this than they’re letting on.

If only he knew she was too.

Isn’t that why he’s asking, though? Mal’s not blind. He cares in his very aggressive, untypical sort of way. He pays _attention._

That’s more than most people do.

Her phone buzzes again. He looks increasingly like he’s going to tear it out of her pocket if it comes with a promise to answer his questions. The door opens at the same time.

The last person Emmi is expecting to see walk through the door is Tarquin, but lo and behold. He has a good look at most of the apartment, namely them facing off at the very end of the hall, nearly lost in the shadows.

“What do you want, you filthy liar?” she questions. Mal’s look of bemusement lasts all of two seconds before he remembers he’s not supposed to be feeling anything like that.

Tarquin pauses. “I was just going to ask if you were okay.”

“I’d be better if everyone would stop asking me,” she snaps. “Can you leave?”

The words can’t be taken back, but Emmi wishes she could. Tarquin looks sick, like she does. Perhaps Mal just can’t tell as easily as he can with her, because Tarquin almost looks worse.

He leaves, though, silently. Almost slightly dejected. Emmi feels like she kicked a puppy, if the puppy was suddenly a murderous, very large bird. On top of it, Mal turns to watch him go, and Emmi pulls her phone out and breezes back inside their room, slamming the door in his face when he turns back to her. It feels better than she expects it to.

Arwen is sitting up, arms wrapped around her knees, looking smaller than she usually does. Emmi avoids the concerned look in favor of her phone, casting the random notifications aside for the lone message.

 **soran:** what if someone’s already buried there?

Emmi apparently isn’t the only one fixated.

She remembers the name. It’s easy enough to find. “Do you want to go on a date?” she asks. Arwen perks up a bit.

“Where?”

It’s a little bit of a drive. Emmi turns around the phone to let her see - OLIVET MEMORIAL PARK is printed across the top in all capitals.

Arwen raises one elegantly arched eyebrow. “When?”

“Now.”

She looks on curiously. So overwhelmingly curious that Emmi is afraid, until Arwen pops out of the bed and reels her in close enough to press a kiss to her cheek. “Sure thing, babe. Give me twenty.”

She doesn’t ask. Of course she doesn’t.

It’s just another reminder that Emmi deserves none of this.

—

Arwen holds her hand almost the entire way there, just under a half hour drive that feels like at least an hour.

She gets no questions, not even when she quietly reads off the directions and Arwen obediently follows them. Arwen obeys almost nothing.

She looks in another realm. Vibrant, well-rested, actually _alive._ Emmi definitely isn’t two of those things, and is beginning to wonder about the third.

The car is actually quiet, for the most part, until they pull into the parking lot, and even then Arwen waits until they’re both walking to the main building, hand-in-hand. “Something going on that I need to know about?”

“Not sure.” Emmi double checks the plot number Soran texted her. “I’ll let you know.”

The clerk behind the desk is ancient, looking as if he ought to be dead himself, and looks both perplexed and overjoyed at the thought of having people to talk to. Emmi can’t say she blames him for the former one bit; Arwen’s hair today is nearing fluorescent levels of pink, and what the wig lacks in length it makes up for in volume.

They’re probably not his usual fare, to say the least.

Emmi repeats the little information she has to him, along with the plot number, and he disappears to look for a layout of the place. Arwen gently swings their hands back and forth until he returns, fiddling with the end of Emmi’s sleeve with her thumbnail.

The man lays out a small, grainy map of the place and traces a thick black line with a sharpie all the way from the building to the very back of the lot, where he circles over three of the plots instead of just one. Emmi gets the gist of it well enough. It’s far back in the property, a place that seems intentionally hidden almost towards the treeline.

He also tells them, as if no more than an after-though, about how lovely the place is up there. Whoever’s going there will be lucky, he says.

As if Soran’s wrong. Maybe he is.

The car is right there, but Arwen tugs on her hand until she concedes to cross the parking lot by her side, to start up the small inclined road leading further into the cemetery. It shouldn’t be too far of a walk, but the more time there is the more likely she’s going to get questioned.

Emmi can feel it already. Arwen is still holding her hand, looking this way and that, but they’re coming.

“Do you not want to tell me what’s wrong?” Arwen asks. She’s looking out into the distance, the setting sun casting a fierce glow across her skin. She doesn’t deserve it. She never will.

“It’s complicated.”

“And I’m not?”

“More complicated than you,” she corrects. Arwen’s killed someone too, she knows. It wasn’t a thing she ever tried to hide. Emmi knew the details of it within three months of meeting her.

Everything she’s done is so much worse, and it continues to be so. The worst part is, Emmi doesn’t feel a shred of remorse about it. All those men she killed… that was purposeful. She _won’t_ feel bad about it. Perhaps if some of them were accidents, or if she just got in too deep, but no. She knew what she was doing. She’d do it again.

She just wants the end result to change. She doesn’t want to be doing _this_ for the rest of her life.

Well, maybe this in particular. Emmi could handle walking hand-in-hand around a cemetery with Arwen if it meant she didn’t have to go back to the harsh realities of the real world.

“Whatever it is… you can tell me,” Arwen says. “So you know. Not now, if you don’t feel like it.”

Definitely not now. Maybe one day, if she even _has_ a one day.

She hopes she does.

Arwen’s face is carefully concentrated as she directs them down the correct roads, but she’s hiding everything else the way she usually does beneath a carefully crafted facade. Whatever she feels about the situation, truly, she’s not allowing Emmi to see it. Maybe she’s angry. That would certainly be justifiable considering everything Emmi puts her through.

She could just be confused, too. That would be the kinder thing for both of them.

Arwen directs her down a more uneven road closer to the treeline, and then gently nudges Emmi into the grass, cutting diagonally between two headstones and further in. There’s a gap in a row of them twenty long - no disturbance, no flowers, not even a headstone. With a map so small it’s impossible to tell, really, but this has to be.

It doesn’t look like there’s anyone here.

They both stop. Observe. Rather, she does most of the observing, and Arwen stares at her.

“Checking out your future real estate?” Arwen asks. It brings a smile to her face. It _is_ funny, you see, so long as Emmi doesn’t think about it too deeply. It’s just a joke, and Arwen never intended it to be anything else.

So Soran was wrong in his questioning, then. That’s what it looks like. She heard it from the mouth of the clerk himself, and the evidence is staring her directly at the face. If someone was buried here, it would be obvious. Maybe it’s not _meant_ to be obvious, though. Emmi scuffs her foot through the grass, unkempt and past ankle-height. The grass a few inches in front of them is shorter.

 _Noticeably_ shorter.

She does it again, lets her foot swing out. The grass barely skims the bottom of her feet when she stretches it out. This far back, especially with the recent cold that’s beginning to fade and all of the rain, maybe no one bothered to cut it.

That doesn’t change the fact that it’s shorter, especially so right where there would be a headstone, judging by how the plot lines up with the others. It’s not an even space - the places where the grass verges from shorter to longer is filled with uneven lines, as if someone cleared out a space without thinking about where it ended and began, digging with abandon. No even cuts from an actual machine. Just frantic, jagged, bits of grass still not re-grown all the way right before her eyes.

“You good to go?” Arwen asks. She nods, letting go of her hand to send the text, almost mechanically, and for once isn’t forced to explain it.

 **emmi:** went to olivet. clerk told us no one’s buried there. went and looked anyway. the grass is shorter than the rest.

It all seems so very simple, but Soran will understand. There’s meaning behind it that numerous people would glance over. He’s been alive long enough to get what she won’t say in words, what she won’t risk someone else seeing.

It’s ridiculous, because she’s overlooking the facts. The clerk told them that no one’s here. There’s no record of it. There isn’t even a fucking headstone.

There’s no headstone, but she can’t shake the feeling.

Emmi’s right. She knows she is.

—

Arwen only asks once, for real, on the way back.

They even go out for dinner, too, as the sunset fades into night. It’s all trivial things. Emmi finds her eyes darting to the door every-time it opens, over-prepared for the second she has to get up and run. So over-prepared, in fact, that she barely tastes any of her food and can’t remember more than a few words Arwen says over the course of an hour, and then two.

She doesn’t feel bad about what she did, no. Just this.

By the time they’re finished Emmi is ready to crawl back into the safety of her bed, only for Arwen to drive them around for a while instead. She ignores her phone receiving texts. She ignores every meaningful glance Arwen sends her way.

There’s only so long things can go on this way. Something will snap under the pressure, if not someone.

“Are you going to answer that?” Arwen wonders. She hadn’t even noticed her phone ringing, properly for once. It was just another noise blending into the rest of them, unimportant and insignificant.

Icarus answered when she called, though, so when she registers his name across the phone she feels compelled to return the favor. She opens her mouth upon hitting _answer_ but gets interrupted just as fast. “Where are you?” he asks. 

“Hello to you too,” she says drily. “What do you want?”

“Are you going to be home soon?”

“Maybe,” she decides. “Why?”

“We need to talk. Can you come over once you’re home?”

“Why?”

“ _Because.”_

“Icarus.”

“Emmi,” he responds.

“Fine,” she growls, and then hangs up on him. As little conversation as there was, the message seems to have been received in the form of Arwen clicking the turn signal on and beginning to make the wide-turn around back home. Emmi turns the music up and successfully avoids the last possible one-on-one conversation they could have for the ten minute ride back, and on top of that there’s no one even in the parking lot to harass them either. It’s strangely empty for this time of night. Maybe everyone’s got the same idea.

She’s sure they’re not all driving around aimlessly or wandering around cemeteries, but to each their own.

“I’ll only be a few minutes,” she promises. She hopes it’s a promise, at least. “Icarus wants to talk.”

“Who doesn’t, these days?”

Guilt swells in her stomach like a balloon until it threatens to pop. What a mess that would be. Here she is, running off to Icarus, but refusing to talk to her _girlfriend_. It’s not the same thing at all, but it’s not like Arwen knows the difference. She doesn’t know anything because Emmi won’t tell her.

On top of that, she books it. They’re on the same floor, for crying out-loud, but Emmi takes the stairs two at a time and leaves Arwen in the dust, rocketing upstairs and past her own door to theirs, throwing it open without an announcement.

They’re both standing there, waiting not-so patiently, and her questions die on her lips.

“What the hell?” she questions. Soran looks like he just rolled around in a pit of mud for fun. It’s not something she would put past him, really. Icarus… is slightly _less_ terrible, really, but his hands are still filthy and there’s dirt caught underneath his nails where it absolutely doesn’t belong.

There’s no sign of Ria. That feels like a good thing, oddly enough. Hopefully she’s with someone less jumbled than any of them.

“No one’s there,” Icarus tells her. She frowns.

“What?”

“We dug it up,” Soran continues. “I know it might have looked like something was buried there, but—”

“You did _what_?” she interrupts. Icarus is closer; she wants to smack one of them, but feels like he deserves it less. Soran was clearly the one doing it by the looks of him. “I’m glad you waited all of five fucking minutes after I told you to go dig up someone’s grave.”

“But it _isn’t_ ,” Soran says. “Nothing’s there. No coffin, no urn, not even a body.”

“That’s not possible. Someone put something there. Trojan—”

“We don’t know what Trojan did,” he says. “I thought something would be there too, but there’s nothing. Not even past six feet.”

She’s going to scream, or rip her hair out, or beat her fists into the hall until they bleed. She doesn’t want to do any of this anymore. There’s too much happening, and no one knows anything, and Emmi will lose her mind long before she loses her hand.

She thrusts out a hand, instead. “Give me those fucking papers.”

“Why?”

“I’m going to put them back. I’m sick of this. His car isn’t here - I’ll put them back and get out before he gets home.”

“No point now,” Soran warns, but she sees them lying abandoned on the island counter and snatches them up before either of them even move, turning back out the door.

Soran follows her, which is exactly what she predicted, and Icarus is hot on his heels. “Why don’t we ask Myra?” Icarus questions.

“We’re not asking anyone anything.”

“Why not?”

Emmi didn’t think her anger at the world would come out in such a way, but it was bound to happen eventually. She doesn’t even bother knocking, and doesn’t have to force Soran to open the door, either. She lets it swing in, waits for a Trojan level explosion if he’s somehow already arrived home, and receives nothing.

On top of that, the drawer the papers previously called home gets stuck when she pulls on it, and it shakes and rattles when she tries three times over. Soran eventually pries her fingers loose from the handle, opening it in one smooth, easy motion.

“I hate this,” she mutters. What specifically at this point, she has no idea. “And also you, still.”

“Figured.”

Icarus is watching them from the door, two zoo animals trying to open a drawer. His anxious glances up and down the hall don’t go unnoticed. She folds the papers up neatly, following the previous creases, and lays it back down in its spot as if it never left. So long as Trojan never went looking in here the past few days, its absence will never have been missed.

This is over, now. If Soran wants to keep up with his Sherlock Holmes act and drag Icarus into it, he’s more than welcome to.

But she’s _done._

Emmi turns for the door, eager to follow Soran’s already departing footsteps and get the fuck out of dodge. She stops, however. Icarus is still taking up the whole doorway but his focus has changed, now. His eyes are very wide, mouth parted slightly as he looks down the hall. Not outside, though. The one in this very apartment, only feet away.

Soran has stopped, too. She didn’t even realize it. She’s staring more at his back than anything else, but it makes her realize how rigid his shoulders have gone.

He lets out a very long breath. It sounds more like a wheeze, like it hurt coming out. Emmi side-steps up to him. Something in her has to look at whatever they’ve laid their eyes on, even though all of her senses are screaming at her not to. She should run. That’s what she’s good at. That’s what she always does.

This time, she stays.

There’s someone in the hall, so far back, hidden in the dark, that they’re hard to make out at first. Not tall enough to be Trojan, not nearly so imposing. Most people aren’t. It’s no fault of whoever this shadow is.

It’s almost more worrying that it’s not Trojan. Someone is in here with them, leaning almost casually against the wall, just watching. If Icarus hadn’t been standing in the door, it’s possible they would have never noticed.

They reach in, slowly, to the room adjoining, and the warm light from the bathroom spills over them, highlifting soft features that have gone wrong, somehow. They’re all sharp edges, gaunt, shadows harsh on their cheekbones. Their eyes reflect back the yellow, almost, and darken the cuts she can see on their face, a larger one on their neck. Open, but not bloody.

Like they’ve been left there for too long, preserved. Like she’s looking at a corpse.

Emmi knows what she’s been looking at since the second she could make them out. She _knew_ and refused to let her brain accept it. She knows who it is. She doesn’t want to.

No. It’s not happening, not anymore than Tarquin pulling his act a few days ago.

That turned out to be real, though, the same way this is. It’s real. She’s looking at it - _him_ , right in the face.

“Fuck,” Soran says softly, but with more feeling than she thinks she’s ever heard applied to just one word. Emmi allows herself a second to look at him, really look, before this all goes to shit. Open wounds, arms crossed and still with that casual lean, a grin on his face that almost looks artfully practiced. Like he’s alive, when Emmi knows he’s not.

“You went and dug it up, didn’t you?” Nic asks. “Too bad I’m not there anymore.”

Fuck, indeed.


	6. The Warning Signs

**Tuesday, June 27th.  
** **Fourteen days after.**

Ria thinks she could like puzzles, given time.

She knows what puzzles are. Theoretically, of course. They’re something you figure out and solve. This one is different, though. She hadn’t even known what Tarquin was talking about until he had produced the box and dumped several hundred little cardboard pieces all over the floor in-between them both. He went on about edge pieces, for a while, pulling one out to show her when it was evident she had no idea what he was talking about.

She didn’t know how long it had been. Hours? It felt that way. They’ve hardly spoken. Ever since he didn’t leave, likely on account of her talking to him, she’s felt some sort of oddly human obligation to come and make sure he’s still here.

And he is. Sitting on the floor attempting a puzzle, watching her sort pieces into individually colored piles with a sort of amused look on his face.

She keeps sorting them. He steals a few, occasionally, and puts them in their proper places when he discovers them.

It’s working. Ria has no idea how it is. It’s dark, and somehow it seems they’ve both found a little slice of contentment.

Predictably, that’s about when the commotion breaks out downstairs.

It’s audible through the  _ floor _ . General panic, lots of shouting, people’s voices rising and falling. Tarquin sits bolt upright - that’s what humans mean, when they say fight or flight, but she can’t tell more what he’s leaning towards.

Ria could stay here on the floor forever, really.

“I’m gonna go see what’s going on,” he says, getting to his feet. “You can stay here, if you want.”

She does. Ria gets up and follows him anyway.

Her thought process behind all of this is that she’s going to find out eventually, one way or another. Icarus seems to spread information around like its wildfire from what she’s observed, and would never pass on an opportunity to tell her something. If not him, then Tarquin has no relatively close connections that someone would tell him, and one day Ria’s curiosity would override her sense. She would ask. She would find out.

It’s difficult upon first glance to tell exactly what’s going on the floor below. Tarquin opens the stairwell door to an entire gaggle of people - ones she recognizes, ones she doesn’t, people she didn’t even think actually lived here until this moment.

All of it is very overwhelming. He begins to forge a path through the outer fringes but Ria stays put for a moment, trying to get her bearings.

There’s another burst of shouting, the voices coming in waves. “Where the  _ fuck  _ is Trojan?” someone yells, emerging from the apartment across the hall, shoving through people to get out.

“Percy!” Someone is calling after him, frantically, but he’s already gone. She saw his back before he catapulted himself down the stairs. Every movement looks wild, frenzied, as if he’s lost control and is running purely on animalistic instinct.

She hasn’t seen that look on very many people. Just enough to know that it’s not good, though.

Ria wiggles her way to the wall, keeping as much distance as she can between herself and the busy patrons surrounding her. Better to be unobtrusive during this situation, whatever it entails. She’s already small enough to go unnoticed most of the time, and now that they’ve gotten used to her presence all she has to do is duck her head and go on her merry way.

She makes it to the first door unscathed. Icarus is standing there, fist pressed over his mouth. He doesn’t even look down at her, when he usually jumps at her sudden and silent appearances. Soran is standing in front of him with the best look at whatever’s going on of them all, like a buffer. He’s not doing much other than standing there.

“What’s going on?” she asks. Icarus says nothing. Maybe he didn’t hear it. Ria isn’t sure she can be any louder, though, not with the volume of the voices surrounding her. For now she’ll just have to wait and see. Tarquin could come back with an explanation, too. She’s lost sight of him. He could have gotten through.

Everyone looks so concerned, though, that it’s worrying her. Not an emotion she normally feels a terribly lot of, if she’s being honest. They’re not supposed to. She blew most of that out of the water the second she went down to check on Tarquin that first time, and she’s losing the right of it right here, right now.

Anyone else would tell her to cut her losses, go inside, ignore it. Muelara certainly would. She’s all sense, good head on her shoulders, stronger than anyone Ria knows.

Or knew. These people here… they’re something else.

They’re stronger.

Percy re-appears, suddenly, the stairwell door slamming so hard against the opposite wall that she barely holds in her flinch. Icarus certainly doesn’t.

“Someone find out where the fuck he went,” Percy snaps. “I’m going to fucking kill him.”

“You can try, and you won’t win” Soran objects. He doesn’t even acknowledge it, storming back inside with footsteps that practically make the hall shake. Even Icarus reaches forward to nudge him, as if to say  _ not now, bad timing. _

It can’t be that bad… can it?

Ria ducks forward, under Soran’s arm, and finally emerges herself into the thick of the people, all the way up to where Mel’s standing, nearly blocking the door. He’s the main reason she can’t see, and he doesn’t attempt to stop her when she eases around him. Tarquin’s just in front of her, a step inside the doorway. There’s not that many other people there besides that. Emmi, mouth slightly agape, eyes deniably panicked. Jupiter, who looks close to tears. Percy, who may actually  _ be  _ crying, or at least he was. There are still tear tracks shiny down his cheeks. He’s holding onto someone’s arm, someone she doesn’t recognize from the back alone.

Unless she does…

“You might not want to be here for this,” Tarquin says. Another warning, the same way he told her to close her eyes before he made that man pull the trigger on himself. She listened that time.

At the sound of his voice, the person causing the unfamiliar itch in her brain turns around despite Percy’s death grip on his arm.

She doesn’t mean to, but she  _ flinches.  _ She only saw him from far away, before, that stranger in the parking lot. The cut on his face is still open and raw, deeper than she would have expected. His eyes are definitely off-colored.

“Ah, the proper introduction!” he says, a grin snapping to his face so suddenly it looks unnatural. Ria wants to run away from the sight of it.

“What the fuck,” Percy chokes out. “Nic, what the fuck, what did he —”

The rest of the words are lost as she processes the name. Nic, the one they were missing, something about three going on four months, someone undeniably  _ human… _

Not anymore, her brain practically screams at her.  _ Not anymore. _

Okay, maybe it is as bad as it can get.

“Oh, nothing,” Nic says. Even his voice sounds inherently wrong. “Well, nothing  _ intentionally _ . Killed me accidentally - wanted to bring me back, though! Accidentally did a  _ very  _ bad job at it, however, I may add. Accidents, am I right?”

Nobody really talked about him. The way they did made him sound like a saint. That’s not what she’s looking at now, nor what she’s hearing. There’s no other polite way to put it - he looks  _ evil.  _ There are old, yellowed bandages escaping from the end of his shirt sleeves, tattered beyond belief. She swears something in the jagged cut along his neck that she finally notices is  _ moving _ , as if something is living inside it.

He’s still smiling at her.

Tarquin and Mel both reach for her at nearly the same time. Mel is more successful. He drags her back into the hall, clearly expecting more of a fight. She nearly falls over, he yanks on her so hard offering a muttered apology as he spins her back the opposite way down the hall and directly into Soran.

More commotion, behind her. Ria can hardly see again, but gets just enough of a view as Nic stumbles out into the hall regardless of how hard Percy is trying to pull him back, like he doesn’t feel it at all. Even Mel rears back from him. If that’s what’s going on here, then it’s worse than she thought. So much worse her brain can’t even make sense of it.

“If your replacements can’t handle this, get them to leave now!” Nic shouts, and it feels like a message following her down the hall. “Before they end up dead!”

Soran pushes her into the apartment without asking, and then, on second thought, shoves Icarus right in after her. He slams the door shut before she even gets another breath in, trapping them in and leaving him on-guard in the hall.

Icarus whispers something under his breath at the closed door, something that sounds an awful lot like a prayer he most certainly doesn’t believe in. It’s not going to do them any good, then.

She doesn’t remember letting her legs give out, but the wall is at her back, and the floor is cold when she slides down to meet it. Icarus lets his head thunk into the wall next to her, directly where she’s chosen.

It doesn’t even feel like enough of a reaction.

Nothing would.

—

“I’m going for a walk,” she announces, though it’s pitifully quiet.

Everything is. Soran looks at her, over the counter. The toaster pops up two slices behind him. He doesn’t even flinch.

She does, though.

There’s even less of a proper answer from Icarus. He’s on the couch, legs tucked safely underneath him from whatever monsters could be roaming around on the floor. He’s looking at the television but not really  _ seeing  _ it. Colors flash, people speak. There’s no reaction. His eyes are only seeing whatever images his brain is conjuring up.

“Bring someone with you,” Soran says, finally. Icarus shifts at the sound of his voice, but has yet to blink.

“Why?”

“Because no one knows where Trojan is.”

Right. Because Trojan’s gone, and Trojan killed Nic, or at least she  _ thinks  _ that’s the simplistic version of it all. Soran knows more, he has to because of the length of time he spent out in the hall after he got rid of them both, but she’s heard none of it. Soran has more of the story, which means Icarus does too, and Ria has been left alone, abandoned in the dark.

She doesn’t like the dark. It reminds her too much of space.

She didn’t like space much either, to be honest.

It’s plenty bright out now, though. Ria’s first few steps out into the hall are cautious, even though it’s been nearly twelve hours. There’s no telling what someone did with Nic, where he is now, what anyone is continuing to do. Everything is frightfully empty, quiet, as if everyone else in the building packed up and moved on in the few minutes of sleep she got last night.

She goes to retrieve Tarquin because there’s no one else to get, really, and he puts a pair of shoes on without asking for an explanation as if he was expecting her to appear all along. It’s exactly what she hoped to get. He follows her downstairs silently, footsteps shuffling along, shoulders bowed forward and eyes following every crack in the ground.

Ria blinks at the sun outside. Stares too long at the curb where Nic had been sitting that night, under what she now rightfully assumes is a window leading to Trojan’s apartment.

Tarquin shoves his own sunglasses over her face while she’s looking, after only a second of considering donning them himself. It’s too warm for much else. She leaves her hood down.

Maybe she shouldn’t be out like this. Maybe none of them should be. Nic was out when he died, too, all alone and vulnerable. When Trojan accidentally got to him.

And he’s still out there somewhere, now.

“Is he really not coming back?” she asks. Tarquin shoves his hands in his pockets, takes note of her speed, and slows his pace just a bit to match hers.

It’s weird, him being next to her, human, two feet on the ground. Or is it weirder that he once wasn’t?

“Myra called him.” He shrugs. “Left him a message, I think. He knows we know. If I had to guess, he’s probably not coming back ever. I wouldn’t.”

“You wouldn’t kill anyone… like that.”

“No, but I don’t think it matters. Nic said it was an accident, but that was almost four months ago. He was dead for two weeks, max. Trojan kept him in the back of the freezer at the cafe and had to move him before Myra noticed, so he buried him. Figured out how to bring him back. But what then? He didn’t do anything else. He didn’t tell anybody.”

“Because he’s not the same, is he?” she asks. It’s only proper to assume so, judging by everyone’s reaction.

“Nic was just… good,” Tarquin says. “Way better than what any of us deserved. Whatever Trojan did, it went wrong. Fast.”

“He knew he messed up.”

“And didn’t care,” Tarquin finishes. Not where she had been about to go, at all, but who is she to say? “Trojan’s only out for himself. He might have felt bad at first, but not bad enough to tell anyone. It’s all so much fucking worse because he didn’t tell anyone.”

“Would you have?” she asks quietly. She hears him swallow despite the business of the sidewalk around them, can see his throat working as he tries to think of something.

Sure, Tarquin would never have done it in the first place, but what if? Another universe, another incident… it’s always possible. Would he have told anyone?

She’s realizing it doesn’t matter. Trojan scares her. Nic scares her in a worse way.

Tarquin killed two people right before her eyes and he still doesn’t scare her.

Muelara said the things down here were bad. Was she talking about the supernaturals, or the humans? They all do bad things. Surely she couldn’t have been talking about everyone. There’s no way for her to know such a thing.

He still hasn’t answered her, and at this point Ria is no longer expecting an answer. It wasn’t a good thing to ask, anyway. Unfortunately for her, she’s always had this tendency to speak little and only say things she shouldn’t when she dares to.

They all have their things they don’t want to say aloud.

Instead of thinking up something eloquent, Tarquin's looking off now, eyes sweeping over the people and the buildings all the way down the hill, as if looking for something in particular. She had no direction in mind, but there’s likely no reason for one. They’re just walking, clearing their minds, thinking about things easier than they were inside and hopefully letting them go with the wind.

She catches sight of something in the crowd at long last, a movement that doesn’t fit in with the rest. Humans are clumsy things, and even she is too at the best of her days, but she’s not supposed to be. The ripple in the crowd is all grace, like the stalking of an animal, each footstep precise and planned out well in advance.

It’s just a flash of white hair, and it’s enough to nearly send her to her knees in the middle of the sidewalk.

She stops. Tarquin makes it a few feet before he realizes, turning to watch her. Ria feels frozen in place watching them, head down like Tarquin’s was up until a moment ago. She can’t even make out who it is - broad stature, tall frame, but they’re all tall. All of them except her.

Something in her itches to cross the road, and that part of her is  _ insane.  _ If she goes, that’s game-over. They won’t let her return to the building. It’s back to how it was before, back to the plan, everything she doesn’t  _ want _ …

“Ria,” Tarquin says. She can’t tear her eyes away. They’re adjacent, and then further down the opposite side of the road. No way they see her now.

They’re looking for her though, aren’t they? They’ve all joined up, and they’re missing her, and they’re not going to let it remain that way.

She’s supposed to be with them.

“Hey,” Tarquin murmurs, softer, matching the sudden grip he has on her arm. He’s realized, his gaze following hers across the sidewalk to follow them all the same. “It’s okay.”

It’s not. She shakes her head. This could all get so bad, and they don’t know it.

She’s losing them again to the crowd, and instead of searching any further she takes a step forward, nearly tripping over Tarquin and a sudden rise in the pavement simultaneously. He keeps her standing. She wants nothing more than to run back to the relative, halfway safety of the building, but that would mean following them back up the road.

“Emmi’s right, isn’t she?” Tarquin asks. “This is worse than what you’re telling us.”

Maybe Ria is a terrible person after all. She never used to think that way. She thought if she got out of it, refused, that it would be an exemption. Turns out being a bystander is just as bad, especially when she  _ knows.  _ It’s not even about death, anymore. They could live, or they could die.

But she doesn’t want anything to happen, not a single second of it.

How did it come down to her to stop it?

“I’ll tell you,” she says quietly. Saying the words aloud only confirms the fact that she’s a traitor, that it’s wrong.

Everything about this is wrong.

Tarquin looks surprised for a moment until he steers her back into the flow of traffic, gently easing her back in after a gaggle of people until she blends in with the crowd once again. It’s easier to breathe once she does.

He could be far, far away right now if she hadn’t stopped him. He would be safe. Safer than he is here.

That’s on Ria. All of this is on her if it goes south.

So she can’t let it.

—

To top it all of, Ria has to physically stop Tarquin from getting Emmi.

Something about Emmi is different, more accusatory. Like she already knows and is just waiting for the confession.

She won’t be able to say any of it if Emmi is there. Not for the first time. Maybe after, once it’s easier, when she has the words…

Or maybe never, depending on how this goes. This could be the end of the line for her right here depending on their reactions.

Her walk was too quick, and not nearly enough time to collect all of her jumbled thoughts. On top of that, her sudden reappearance seems to have woken Icarus up some. He looks alive again. That may have had something to do with Tarquin sitting on the couch and nudging him until he blinked several times over.

Ria could join them, but she sits down on the floor. The hard surface digging into her ankles is more comfortable than any couch could be. It’s familiar.

She doesn’t exactly know where Soran’s gone, or if he’s even still around, but she’s going to lose her nerve.

She can already feel it fading away.

“Earth was the closest inhabitable planet to us,” she starts. “Everything was dying. They had to take everyone that was capable of surviving, almost exclusively the youngest of us, and leave. So that ended up being fifty-six, and the most fit elder of our colony, and that was it. She let us all age in cryosleep until last year, and then—”

“Hold on a second,” Icarus interrupts. “You’re telling me you’ve only actually been  _ legitimately  _ alive for like a year?”

She nods. He opens and closes his mouth a few times, like a gaping fish. She awaits a similar reaction from Tarquin, but his face is carefully blank. It’s like he trained for this moment.

“We knew it was going to be earth,” she clarifies. “We also knew that everything down here, namely all of you, wouldn’t take kindly to that. So our elder - Muelara, she came up with numerous contingency plans. Things to combat all of the possible options.”

“So which one are we looking at?” Soran asks. He’s leaning into the wall right before the hall begins. She gets the feeling he’s been standing there the whole time.

She’s not the only one attempting to be not so obvious, it seems.

“I always thought it was going to be one of the bad ones, but I don’t  _ know _ ,” she explains. “If I was with them, I would. But today… I saw one of them. We were in complete agreement to group up and lay low until we figured out which one it was. The only way any of them would be out like that, by themselves, is if they were prepping.”

Or if they were her, her brain whispers back. She’s been out there alone too, trying to avoid all of this.

If only she could have.

“Prepping for what?” Tarquin asks.

“One of the bad ones,” she says quietly. “Whichever one it is.”

“So you don’t know.”

“No,” she replies. “But I think… the only way Muelara would ever resort to desperate measures is if something was going seriously wrong. Some of us were being taken, or killed or—”

“If one of you was missing,” Soran says flatly.

“She doesn’t care enough about me. There has to be others, too.”

“So what, then?”

“She’ll close off the city. They’ll try to… get whoever’s missing back, or figure out what they’re going to do next. She said something like “hanging an axe over their heads”. And if that doesn’t work, she’ll go looking.”

They all want to ask.  _ For what _ ? Their eyes are betraying the question. She’s never been surrounded by so many people who have emotions as viciously visible as these.

Ria is already so exhausted by all of this. Has she ever spoken this many words in her life? It doesn’t feel that way. No one ever wanted her to. She never did, either.

“She made us touch down here for a reason,” Ria continues. “She said it was somewhere in California, in one of the deserts. I don’t even know  _ what  _ it is. None of us do. But whatever it is, it’s an all-powerful object. Whoever touches it gains access to everything they need. All of their powers, all of their knowledge. Complete and total control over it all.”

“So let me get this straight,” Tarquin says. His voice is much less even than it was before. “If she doesn’t get her way, exactly, then she’ll track it down, and what?”

“Fuck us completely,” Soran finishes, and looks right at her. “You know that’s what she’ll do. That’s why you asked for help. You don’t want to be held responsible.”

“I’m not—”

“She isn’t responsible,” Tarquin insists.

“Who is, then?”

She just wanted to avoid all of this. There could have been another option, one that involved no contingency plan. Just living. Deep down inside, Ria always  _ knew  _ it wouldn’t happen. She never had the same amount of optimism anyone else did.

It could have all been so good, otherwise.

“God, between this and Nic, I need a fucking nap,” Icarus mumbles, rubbing at his temples. It’s not even noon. She relates deeply, anyway.

And all of it, really, she doesn’t even know about. It’s all pieces she was never given the full story to.

Icarus gets up, head almost fully in his hands, and heads for the bedroom. Apparently he was serious. By the looks of it, Soran just barely resists the urge to knock him into the wall as he goes by.

He stares at them both once Icarus is gone, as if waiting for something more. Tarquin clearly has nothing to offer, and her tank is empty. He exits the apartment with a resounding thud of the door, so loud it echoes about the room.

“Is he going to tell everyone?” she asks quietly. Why else would he be leaving?

“Not everyone,” Tarquin answers. “But…”

But some of them. All of these people are still reeling from last night. There’s nothing good about what she just said, and it won’t sound any better coming from Soran. There’s nothing in the world that could make it so. Ria has heard the words so many times, and somehow they always sounded better. Coming from Muelara they were simple, elegant,  _ good.  _ They weren’t to do anything bad. It was just basic survival.

People are going to die if it happens the way Ria is imagining right here, right now.

“So,” Tarquin says slowly. “End of the world. That’s fun.”

She hadn’t thought of it like that until now but she nods, dully. She didn’t get to see hers end the first time, but she’ll be around for this one.

Everyone gets what’s coming to them eventually. This is hers, for allowing this.

Ria gets up and heads for the bathroom like her feet are made of lead, but gets there unscathed. Tarquin doesn’t follow.

She locks the door behind her.

Really, she should have never come out to begin with.

—

She gets twenty minutes.

All in all, it’s more than Ria expected, for no one to demand further answers, to pester for things she doesn’t have.

She even thinks Tarquin leaves, too. His footsteps are quiet, the near-silence that comes from someone who only longs to be unobtrusive but is rarely successful.

A different set returns not long after, though. It’s not Icarus. She hasn’t heard so much of a peep from the direction of the bedroom since she locked herself in here. He’s willing all of this to be fake, to sleep and wake to a new reality. If it was that simple, Ria would have done it ages ago.

A quiet knock, finally. Ria could ignore it. The chances of someone breaking down the door to get to her are slim, despite the capabilities of nearly all of them to do it.

Ria reaches over to unlock the door all without taking her eyes off of the mirror, of all of the things she hates so very much. The differences. The dead giveaways.

In the reflection, Emmi cracks the door open. Her chest hurts. It’s a miracle that her heart is even still working.

“I won’t say  _ I told you so  _ because I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t get it, anyway,” Emmi starts. She opens the door, places a small bag on the counter next to Ria’s clenched hand, and then closes it once again behind her.

She likes small spaces well enough, but not anymore. Not stuck in here like this.

“How much did he tell you?”

“The gist,” Emmi answers. “How much of it is true?”

“All of it.”

Emmi hums - it’s very deeply displeased, but not as explosive as she expected. Rage, violence, fear. Those are all of the emotions Ria is very slowly becoming accustomed to, and the very ones she expected to see on the faces of those around her today.

“Sit down,” Emmi requests. She listens. It will make all of this infinitely less painful if she just listens and does what she’s told. Another Muelara lesson. She’s gotten quite good at it.

“I got a few of the same pair,” she says, a sentence Ria can’t make sense of in all the time Emmi goes rummaging through the bag. “I think they’ll work, but I just wanted to make sure. I’m pretty sure I can order a whole case of them, but—”

“What do you mean?” she asks. Emmi finally finishes tearing strips of cardboard away from the first of the packages, waving a small plastic container at her. Two small circles, joined by an even smaller piece of plastic in the middle.

Ria has no idea what’s going on anymore.

“Contacts,” she explains, less of a real explanation and more of a show as she continues to shake the container. “You put them in, voila. No obvious freaky alien eyes.”

She blinks. Emmi sighs. “Just stay still and let me…”

She trails off, grabbing at Ria’s face to tilt her head up. Something in her should be panicking, but Emmi’s hand is nowhere near rough, just a gentle guide before she lets go. Ria doesn’t move.

“It’ll be weird at first, but just give it a few seconds,” Emmi says. Balanced on the end of her finger is something so small Ria almost misses it, clear at the very fringes and a very otherwise unassuming blue in the middle. Like what she has now except… normal.

It’s a strange discomfort that Ria almost shies away from, but Emmi is patient and painfully slow with it. She has no idea what to make of this sudden change. How did admitting things do  _ this _ ?

“Okay, let me see,” Emmi demands. When she opens her eye some of the strange feeling seems to dissipate, and Emmi lets out an approving whistle. “Shit, that actually worked.”

Ria turns for the mirror. Her left eye is still a bright, almost glowing blue, those other colors mingling alongside it only making it more obviously unnatural, but the right is a pale blue, almost gray in certain parts. She feels like she’s seen people on the streets with these exact eyes.

Because they’re normal.

She doesn’t know if crying is good for contacts, but she wants to.

“Let me do the other one,” Emmi says. Ria sits still once again, head tilted to the previous position, and lets her work.

It’s easier, knowing the result. When she opens her eyes this time what looks back at her in the mirror is like an every-day person. The white hair still looks shocking, to say the least, but that’s unavoidable.

Her fingers drift over the longest of the strands just barely hanging over her shoulders. It’s still ragged from the last time she hacked off the bottom few inches once it started to get too long, but at least it looks uniform from a distance.

“We can fix that too, if you want.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, Noelani is about as close to a professional level hair stylist as you can get, so. I’m sure she could figure it out. Whatever color you want.”

She won’t look the same whatsoever, and isn’t that what she’s always wanted? Separation has been something she’s always longed for, an ability to exist just as herself and not lumped in with something she has no control over.

Having that offered to you after such a length of time is daunting. She doesn’t know how to be anything other than this.

She owes it to herself to try, though, as hard as it is to consider.

“I like blue,” she decides. It’s a given. Maybe not quite the same as her eyes  _ now.  _ Something darker, even.

Emmi snorts. “Well, not the most subtle color in the world, but that works. I’ll ask Noelani about it.”

Ria can’t even picture it. Isperia never could have, a few weeks ago. Hope wasn’t a thing she was taught to hold onto.

Another failed lesson.

Emmi’s in the midst of explaining the actual process behind all of the little containers and the bottles of solution, between flipping through pages on her phone to order more of them. To think, Ria didn’t even ask.

“Why are you doing this?” she asks finally, keeping herself still when Emmi looks at her. All she wants to do is run away. It’s the easy way out and they both know it.

“I did this for a while, too,” Emmi admits. “Hid myself.”

“That doesn’t mean you have to—”

“I know,” she interrupts. “But it was awful, let me tell you. And it was made even worse through the fact that I had no one to tell me.”

Emmi doesn’t strike her as the type of person that handles being alone well. For short periods of time, anyone can fake a charade, especially if no one is around to see, but that doesn’t mean it’s not difficult. There are more years under her belt, more incidents, more scars. Things Ria couldn’t even begin to imagine, and more that she likely doesn’t want to.

“I don’t think you’re a bad person,” Emmi continues. “Sure, spilling the beans sooner might have helped, but… nothing we can do now.”

“I’ve been thinking about that, actually,” Soran insists, poking his head into the bathroom. At least someone is nailing the whole creepily silent thing that’s not her, for once.

“You can do that?” Emmi asks, eyes widening very innocently. If only her smile looked the same.

“Shut up. I was just thinking - if she’s going to go get this object, whatever the fuck it even is, why don’t we go get it ourselves?”

“What?” It comes from both of their mouths at nearly the same time, though hers is quieter.

That’s to be expected.

“Well if it’s inevitable, I’m just saying.”

“So, someone tells you you’re  _ probably  _ likely to die soon based on outside intervention, and suddenly you want to live?” Emmi asks. “What happened to your suicidal tendencies? Don’t tell me Icarus hid all the knives on you.”

“Okay, fuck you, I was just saying.”

“And I heard you!” Emmi insists. “But you don’t even know where the fuck it is.”

“So we get a head-start. If we leave within the week, we’ll find it first. Death Valley’s closest, we’ll start there.”

“Great,” Emmi mutters. “Well, have fun. I’m not coming.”

“I didn’t invite you anyway.”

“Great,” she repeats, and then pats Ria on the shoulder. It’s like they had forgotten she was there until that moment. “I’ll talk to Noelani. For now just try not to let this one drive you insane too much.”

She leaves the bag behind, and is finally a victim of Soran giving into his temptation to knock someone into the wall, though she shoves him right back. It doesn’t look anywhere near like the first time it’s happened. Ria sits down on the bathtub’s edge while Soran watches her go, all the way until he turns back to look at her.

“You don’t like this,” he guesses. “Well, I don’t like someone living with the thought that they can hang an axe over my head and get away with it. If I’m going out, it’s on my own terms. If you think it’s possible, I’ll go and find it myself.”

“I don’t want it,” she murmurs. It’s too much power. That was never here.

“I never said you had to. We’ll hide it, for all I care. So long as she doesn’t have it.”

He’s actually serious. She didn’t think he was until this moment. They have no idea what they’re looking for, or where to start based on actual scientific fact. They’re just going to go and then… and then who knows, really. Certainly not Ria.

But they can figure that out once they find it, because she knows already that she has to go, too. If they can find it, and she thinks they can, she has to be there for it.

Whatever  _ it  _ even is.

“We can find it,” she says. Not nearly confident enough, but she just has to believe it. There’s no telling where that optimism came from, because it wasn’t Muelara’s doing.

Everything else, perhaps, but not this. Never this.

And Ria isn’t about to let her start now.


	7. The Bystander Effect

**Wednesday, June 28th.  
** **Thirteen days after.**

It takes him time to work up to it, but nerve is something Tarquin has always been chock full of.

Emmi can’t get rid of him forever.

Unfortunately that means him heading downstairs, something Tarquin doesn’t even want to do in the first place. There’s not just an elephant in the room. He’s in the entire building.

Nic is consuming a lot of his thoughts lately, when he’s not hyper-focused on what Ria told them yesterday. His brain is under attack, having been invaded by knowledge he never wanted and things that would have done well to never happen at all.

He doesn’t go downstairs for Nic, though. He’s got enough people worrying about him. Tarquin takes a few near-silent steps into the very apartment, calling out to whatever Gods still listen to him that no one there is lurking. No one he can’t handle, anyway.

Somehow, it works. Even better than it ought to have, really. Emmi is the only one in sight, and the apartment is otherwise silent. There’s no way she’s the only one here, and Nic has to be tucked away in some part of it, but Tarquin isn’t about to ask.

Asking is what’s gotten them into all of this trouble in the first place.

Emmi’s gazes stays stubbornly on the television, an inaptly placed infomercial that she’s not paying any real attention to. “What’s up?” she asks flatly. Her voice is carefully disinterested.

“Just wondering if you’ll answer my question for real, now.”

“What question?”

She knows. This dance routine of careful avoidance is only drawing things out longer between them. Tarquin doesn’t want to interrogate her anymore than she wants to be interrogated. She won’t even look him in the eye.

He’s not asking for the full story. Just the truth.

“Is it wrong of me to want to know if you’re okay or not?”

“It is when you keep asking. I already told you.”

“That wasn’t an answer, and you know it,” he fires back. “Those people were there for  _ you.  _ They were going to kill everyone else to get to you.”

“Keep your fucking voice down,” she hisses, glancing warily down the hall. Whoever’s here doesn’t know the truth. Could Tarquin be right about it being all of them?

“You haven’t told anyone, have you?” he guesses. “Not even Arwen.”

“If you want to give someone a lecture on keeping secrets, consider looking in the fucking mirror,” she says under her breath. She really is trying to keep a down-low on all of this. Not Arwen, not anyone. If she won’t tell Arwen, then who is there?

And why won’t she?

It stings, too, because he has no right to ask. Tarquin knows this. It’s not like it was something he was unaware of when he tried the first time, either.

Still, though, to hear it aloud… it's just another reminder that he’s lost everything he fought so hard to hide.

“They’re coming after you for a reason,” he says, voice quieter. “Whatever it is, it can’t be nearly as bad as anything I’ve done. Or maybe it is. We won’t have any room to judge each other then.”

“You’re acting like I’m going to tell you.”

“I want you to know that I’m  _ here _ ,” he presses. “Whether you want to tell me now, or in a few days, or —”

“Or never.”

There’s the sting again. “Or never,” he echoes. “If that’s what you really want. But I can help you. If not me, then somebody else. No one here wants anything to happen to you.”

“Have you ever considered that I’m not saying anything because I don’t want anything to happen to  _ you _ ?” Emmi asks. “Didn’t think so. If I tell someone and they get hurt for it, that’s on me. That’s nothing to live with. I won’t.”

So it’s them, then. Not her. Well, maybe her, but a few hundred years under your belt and you begin to matter less and less. He knows it. He watches Soran feel it all the time.

Emmi has other people to consider now. Namely Arwen, who’s done some awful things too, but not possibly as many.

Maybe not as awful as whatever Emmi has, either.

“If you won’t tell me, you need to tell Arwen,” he says, continuing at a breakneck speed even as she opens her mouth for a retort. “You know her. She can handle herself. And she will help you, unconditionally. You’re lucky to have that.”

Emmi looks as if she wants to put one of the numerous throw pillows over her face until she dies from lack of oxygen. She sinks deeper into the cushions with a groan, scrubbing at her cheeks furiously until her skin begins to redden.

“You have that too, you know,” she tells him. He knew, deep down, but his heart still swells a little bigger from hearing it aloud.

It’s the one reason why staying hasn’t made him throw up. Yet, anyway. The people here want him to stay. They’ll keep him safe, protect him.

That’s exactly what Emmi is afraid of at the end of the day. Tarquin doesn’t want anyone going down on his behalf either, but he has no control over it now. Emmi is clinging onto all the control she has left by her fingertips, refusing to let go. She’ll handle things her way, on her own terms. Without sacrifice, unless it's her own.

She would protect him if it came down to that. He just wants to do the same.

“I’m here,” is all he says, his voice far too gentle. It’s like she’s a skittish, wounded animal, and she almost looks it too. Her eyes are shiny, shinier than he’s ever seen them before.

It’s like he didn’t think she was capable of crying until now.

Tarquin hesitates before he leans down to hug her, unsure of if she’s going to tell him off or hit him. She accepts it readily, instead, wrapping her arms tight around him and squeezing, even harder than he’s got a hold on her.

“You’ll figure it out,” he assures. She nods against his shoulder. Sniffles a bit. When he pulls away she’s not crying, thankfully, but the option is certainly there.

That option is interrupted by a whole spew of profanity from another room, seconds before Percy bursts out from it like the entirety of hell is on its heels.

Almost, but not quite.

He goes tearing past them, a blur so fast that Tarquin barely recognizes him. He definitely recognizes the baseball bat clutched in his hands, however. A second later Nic follows him out; Tarquin forces himself to stay rooted in one spot. Nic gives him a cheery smile, waves on top of it, and then departs as well. His pace is far too casual to follow that of Percy’s frantic energy.

It’s the first time Tarquin’s seen him in anything short-sleeved since. There are fresh bandages up and down his arms, hiding whatever’s underneath.

He hopes he never sees.

There’s another mutter from further down the hall, a suspicious sounding crash, and then Mal practically trips into the hall. “Fuck’s sake,” he snarls. “I hate everything.”

“What’s going on?”

“Trojan’s downstairs.”

“What?” Emmi says alarmed. Tarquin almost manages it, but just about chokes instead. He thinks  _ Percy’s first down there  _ and then  _ oh no, baseball bat  _ and after that, not much else at all, as he races out into the hallway after Mal.

He gets downstairs in record time, but not fast enough. His feet hit the asphalt in time for the bat to connect with the center of Trojan’s front windshield. His face behind it, neutral as always, splinters into several hundred pieces.

Every other word coming out of Percy’s mouth is nonsensical, but he’s screaming every single one he can think of, and not one of them moves Trojan at all. Another swing. This time the bat connects dead-center and cracks a hole the size of a basketball all the way through. A shower of glass rains down over Trojan’s form in the driver’s seat. Tarquin watches him blink a few times as it finishes pattering all over him.

Mal’s not stopping him. Emmi’s not stopping him. Nic is  _ certainly  _ not stopping him. He actually looks amused, an expression that hasn’t left his face since they found him.

Like this is all so fucking  _ funny. _

No one’s stopping him because it’s justified, at the end of the day. He hates saying it, but it’s the truth.

Percy is about to move on, rounding the front of the car to the driver’s side, smashing the bat into the headlight as he goes. The window won’t hold so easy, though. That bat is going into Trojan’s face in the next couple of swings.

Or not. Trojan opens the door so suddenly it catches Percy in the middle and sends him stumbling back a few steps, still clutching onto the bat.

Now, Trojan is menacing on a  _ good day.  _ This is a very bad one, he’s realizing, and menacing doesn’t even come close to how murderous he looks now. It’s not like he’s suddenly overprotective towards his piece of shit car - this is just unadulterated anger, out in the open for everyone to lay eyes on.

The bat goes clattering to the ground. Trojan rips it out of his hands like it’s a child’s toy. It happens so fast Tarquin sees nothing but a blur as Trojan’s fist catches Percy across the face before he sprawls out against the side of the car. Fresh blood spills from his palms to match his equally bloody nose as he catches himself on the hood, glass strewn about.

“You might wanna stay down!” Nic calls, though he looks as if he’s about to start cheering, for some asinine reason.

Apparently it really is funny.

And, predictably, Percy doesn’t listen. Percy doesn’t know how to listen. He’s not even risen back to his full height when Trojan hits him again, square in the jaw. Something cracks, this time, before he hits the ground like Trojan went for his legs instead. Something else gives way when he goes to catch himself. Tarquin isn’t sure what, but something does.

He feels sick watching Percy on the ground like this, arm curled tight to his chest, blood streaked messily across his face. He’s so busy looking down that he misses Trojan picking up the bat, but not the swing just before it connects somewhere at his side. There’s no way something doesn’t break, regardless of if he can hear it or not.

“If someone’s going to intervene, you might want to do it before he opens up his head,” Emmi suggests.

Mal doesn’t move. The lack of reaction on anybody else's part has made him want to stay put as well, but there’s no way he can do it.

Trojan hits him one more time before Tarquin gets there and then  _ throws  _ the bat at him. It spins a few times and bounces into the ground in front of his feet before he scoops it up. It’s not his staff, but it’ll do.

Percy is clearly trying to do something other than lay there in a pathetic little heap, but Trojan’s foot scrapes forward again and he goes still, as if bracing for a kick.

“Look at you, acting all high and fucking mighty until you get one punch thrown at you,” he snarls. “And you,” he continues, rounding on Tarquin. “Are fucking asking for it just as much, thinking all of a sudden you have any right to interefere.”

“Someone has to.” It honest to God sounds like Percy whimpers, but it douses him with some vindication that he needed so desperately. “I think you’ve messed up enough.”

“You have no idea how much worse it could get,” Trojan forces out through gritted teeth, but takes a few wide, angry steps around him, headed for the building. No one ever thought he would come back.

They didn’t prepare for this.

Trojan smashes his fist into the wall next to the door, as if ridding himself of the last of his anger, and turns around. Emmi takes several large, precautionary steps away from him.

It’s only Nic he’s worried about, wisely so. Nic, who doesn’t so much hesitate as he observes what’s on the ground in front of him with a childlike curiosity in his eyes. Like he’s a kid on a playground, about to poke a stick into a dead bird.

He turns around and nearly skips after Trojan’s departing form. His skin crawls all over.

“I’ll go get Noelani,” Emmi offers, turning after them. She wouldn’t if she had no reason to.

“Don’t,” Percy cuts in. His voice is thick, like there’s a lump on his throat. Tarquin can’t quite tell if he’s crying from this angle. “Don’t get Noelani.”

“What?”

“Take me to the fucking hospital,” he manages, voice shaking. He’s trying to sit up, wrist cradled against his chest, blood dripping from his nose and mouth. He’s also not getting very far.

“What?” he repeats. He struggles for another long, futile moment until Tarquin crouches down next to him, settling a hand on his leg. It feels like the only safe place to touch.

“You heard me.”

“You want me to take you to the hospital?”

“You’re the only fucking person here apparently any good at charading as a goddamn human being,” he snaps, tripping over half of the words before they come out, looking as if he’d scramble away if his legs would get to work, or if Tarquin would let go of him.

He won’t, but that’s not the point.

Mal leans over his shoulder, tugging the bat free from his hands. “That’s mine, thanks. You might as well take him if he’s going to be a prick about it.”

Percy mutters something under his breath, blood at the corner of his mouth.

The building’s main door finally clangs shut. Tarquin turns, and sees Nic dart off down the hall, presumably following Trojan. As if he was watching for even just a little while longer.

Apparently they all should have been.

—

“You wanna know what the worst part is?” Percy asks dazedly.

Tarquin could certainly name a few, but he keeps his eyes on the road. Percy narrowing down anything to be worse than another in his current state is a miracle in itself.

It’s dark by the time he gets him out of the hospital. His eyes are glazed, yellow-orange from the glare of the street-lights, and not looking at anything at all.

Tarquin still bites, though, because he feels bad. “What?”

“The fact that he didn’t even care. He just stood there and watched it happen. He almost looked…”

Happy, delighted, excited. All words Tarquin doesn’t like to associate with Nic when he’s watching Percy get beaten to a pulp. The old Nic would have interfered immediately regardless of any risk posed to himself. He would have taken every hit for him.

Instead he had watched it all happen like he was at the circus, only a low barrier between him and whatever atrocities were happening on the other side.

People are never willing to move.

He chances a glance over. Percy is slumped deeper into the seat than ever before, one leg tucked awkwardly underneath him. His right arm is both casted and held in a sling. They had to reset both his jaw and nose. Did x-rays on his ribs to confirm they were cracked and not in just a hundred pieces. His face has continued to swell and bruise, leaving him a misshapen shell of his former self.

He’s very calm about it all. That might be because of the oxycodone, but Tarquin isn’t about to complain.

“I’m sorry,” he decides eventually. It’s not nearly enough.

“I know.”

“Why’d you do it?”

“Because I fucking hate him. Because he ruined my life. And now he’s fucking back like, like—”

Like what? They don’t even know. Percy clearly doesn’t, either, but he doesn’t like it, and he’s not alone in that particular boat.

“Despite it all, I believe it was an accident.”

“Doesn’t change the fact that he ruined my fucking life.”

Alright, Percy has him there. He’d say it was dramatic, maybe, if he hadn’t seen Nic firsthand, or had to listen to every word that comes out of his mouth. It’s like he’s watching a different person exist in Nic’s body, which means it’s nowhere near the worst for him. Percy’s the one trying to keep a hold on him, desperately clutching on as if he’s fading away right before their eyes.

As if he hasn’t already faded completely.

“Have you tried talking to him?” he asks.

“Talk,” Percy echoes dully. “He just laughs at everything I say. It’s like someone took his brain out for observation and then didn’t put it back in right.”

Well, they knew that. Whatever Trojan did to bring him back was it good, or maybe it was until something went wrong halfway through. He tried, sure, but look at the cost of it all.

Tarquin would never say it aloud, not to Percy, but he  _ wishes  _ Nic was dead. The grieving process, at least, is easy enough to understand. There’s no handbook for what you do with this. Outright death has always been unavoidable, in the end, and no longer an option now.

“Who else has tried?”

“Everyone. He really only laughs at me, though. Everybody else he either tries to run or he just sits there and stares at them. It’s like he  _ knows  _ something isn’t right, but he can’t figure out what.”

“And he… remembers the two of you?”

“He remembers  _ everything.  _ He just doesn’t care.”

Tarquin can’t tell what’s worse, losing the person you love, easy-peasy, or having them within arms reach but unable to even get through to them. It’s this exact reason behind why he runs. Getting close is too difficult and often makes everything worse in the end anyway.

When he turns down the last of the side streets leading to the apartment, Tarquin sees the lights from a mile away. Even when he’s headed towards them, though, he doesn’t realize how close they are. Two cars, dead smack in the center of their parking lot. Only one of them has the lights on, rotating blue and red that wash over both of their faces

Police, for some reason. When he looks at Percy, his face is eerily calm.

“You didn’t,” he says flatly. Percy closes his eyes, but something in them looks a smidgen satisfied before he does. “Percy.”

“What?”

“Tell me you didn’t get him arrested.”

Percy shrugs, followed by a fierce wince. Apparently the drugs aren’t doing quite enough. Tarquin pills off to the curb before the lot. It’s difficult to make sense of it. A few people are outside milling around. There’s no sign of Trojan.

If Tarquin had to guess, it’s because he’s already gone.

Myra’s the first one to beeline for the car when he pulls the key from the ignition, even at such a large distance. She looks mighty concerned, even more so than usual.

“They asked me who did it, and if I wanted to press charges,” Percy explains.

“And you said  _ yes?” _

“Well, I certainly can’t get him arrested for killing Nic, can I?”

No. No, he can’t. That involves exposing Nic to a system that will get him killed anyway. But that also means…

“You did it on purpose,” he realizes. “That’s why you wouldn’t let Noelani heal you.”

“Oh, give the man a prize.” Percy jiggles at the door handle a few frantic times until Tarquin unlocks it, and then he nearly gets his fingers stuck. A purposeful action, and he even got a little bit of satisfaction out of until Trojan beat him into a pulp.

“You remember you started that fight, right?” he asks, the lights strobing across the parking lot. Trojan’s already put away, and the officers are getting back into their cars.

“I started it?” Percy asks incredulously, stumbling out of the car with the crinkly pharmacy bag jammed under one arm. “Nice try.”

Okay, fair enough. He supposes he can’t blame Percy for going after Trojan considering he outright murdered his boyfriend and then lied about it.

Percy grabs the car door for support, teetering about, and then swings himself away when Myra goes to grab his arm. “Don’t fucking touch me,” he snaps. “Unless you wanna go with him.”

“I didn’t even do anything.”

“Fuck  _ you _ ,” he emphasizes. “You’re the one that gave him the fucking money.”

“I didn’t know what he was using it for!” she shouts, watching him amble off. “ _ Percy _ !”

Evidently, it doesn’t really matter. Tarquin didn’t expect it to.

—

**noelani:** aggravated battery, apparently.

**noelani:** misdemeanor or felony depending on how they see it. six months to four years, give or take.

In prison.

Because Percy did it on  _ purpose. _

Tarquin just wishes he could go to sleep.

Noelani has been messaging him for some time now, but he hasn’t worked up the energy to answer. Troublesome, because he’s very obviously online, and she knows she’s being ignored.

If she wants him, she’ll come and get him.

And apparently she does.

No one is very typical in this place, or else she would have tried the door and then eventually left upon receiving no answer. A short while later there’s an insistent rapping at his window, and he rolls to his right to look, seeing Noelani’s smiling face on the other side. The door, or alternatively across the fire escape from Jay and Sabre’s, as if she knew he wasn’t going to get up and answer.

Tarquin stretches out, flipping the lock up, and she clambers in over his bedside table, managing to not knock anything over. Not a difficult feat, considering this apartment is still half-empty. He hasn’t worked up to the courage to unpack all of the boxes. It feels too permanent, even though he knows he’s in too deep to leave now.

She sits down next to him on the bed, patting his leg over to make room. “What’s up?”

“It’s just insane.”

“I know. Myra took Jahaira down to the station. They’re going to find out anything they can. There’s no way we get him out, though.”

“No one  _ wants  _ him out,” he mutters under his breath, not even feeling too unkind about it. It’s the cold, hard truth, and frankly something Trojan deserves after putting them all through this.

As if Tarquin hasn’t put himself through worse.

“I know, but…” Noelani sighs, flopping backwards. “There were better ways to do it, I think.”

“Were there?” he asks. “Can you give me one? If Trojan was scared of the repercussions, we wouldn’t have come back. He’s not scared of us. At least this way he’ll get a taste of  _ something.” _

If he’s starting to sound like a monster, Noelani thankfully doesn’t point it out. She can’t tell him everyone else doesn’t think the same thing. That’s the way Noelani thinks, too, but she’s just too nice to say it.

That’s the fundamental difference between the two of them, and only he’s aware of it. One day Noelani will realize it.

“Incoming,” Jay announces, and Tarquin sees only a shadow fall over him before Jay hits his knee into the windowsill and then falls straight onto the floor, Sabre leaning through to watch his graceless descent. He makes no move to get up.

“Anyone want to reveal their deepest, darkest secrets?” Jay continues, all four limbs stuck out in separate directions like a starfish.

“Already have,” he sighs, throwing an arm over his eyes. Whatever else they want to know will have to be dug for.

He listens to Sabre slip through the window, nearly silent, footsteps careful no doubt as he makes his way over Jay’s prone form without either tripping or being tripped.

“Okay, well I’ll start then,” Jay says. “I actually  _ was  _ born in 1923, but nobody believes me.”

“I believe you,” Sabre says quietly.

“Well no  _ shit _ , but you’re the only one dude, I mean—”

“What did you just say?” Noelani interrupts, voice frantic. “Jay, you’re not serious.”

“No, that’s the issue. Nobody ever thinks I’m serious.”

“Jay,” she repeats. “You can’t just say that and also tell me you’ve tried to tell me like, twenty times and never gotten to the point.”

“But I have!”

Noelani lowers her head into her hands with a groan. Jay had looked amused up until now, but his lips are pursed, something else swimming in his eyes. Not a look he normally holds onto for very long, if at all. Tarquin isn’t sure he’s ever seen it in this much detail before.

“What else?” he asks. Jay swallows, raising his eyes up off the floor. There is something else. Sabre is the only one that looks unchanged - a comforting normalcy, most of the time, but that way now because he’s likely the only other one that knows.

“My family, uh… died, in 1940. All three of them. There were a few bombing runs in Manchester during the war. I wasn’t there. Obviously. But it wasn’t pretty.”

Noelani is already halfway off his bed, arms outstretched to wrestle Jay into them. For once in his life he doesn’t look excited about the prospect. Most of the typical light in his eyes has died out. A creature normally full of enough energy to power the entire building, empty.

“It’s fine,” Jay says over her shoulder. It doesn’t seem like it is, and Noelani squeezes him harder. “Besides, you’re the one who thought Tarquin wouldn’t notice  _ Excalibur  _ just sitting in your room.”

“It’s a sword! How am I supposed to hide that?”

Easily, he wants to say, but so much has been said already that he holds his tongue. They are in fact sitting over a loose floorboard that he hides a staff in, after all.

It’s like Noelani wanted him to find out all along.

“Can I have it?” Jay asks.

“No.”

“Why not? You’ve given it to people before.”

“Cause that worked out so well,” she says, still holding onto his shoulders. “Maybe. One day. We’ll see.”

Something in him beams, at that, smothering some of the darkness that had appeared almost out of nowhere. It wasn’t a thing he enjoyed seeing on Jay’s face. You got so used to seeing certain things that getting anything else almost hurts.

Besides, he can’t help but think back to the all the times he heard Jay joke about it, openly, unabashedly. Those were just the times he was present for, too.

How many times did he try, did he hold himself back because no one was willing to look at the truth?

“I knew that Nic was going to die,” Sabre says, out of the blue. His voice is barely above a whisper. Tarquin nearly rolls off the bed in his haste to look in that direction and so does Jay, dragging Noelani with him. The breeze coming in from the window begins to blow in stronger than before, as if in agreeance.

“Sabre,” Jay says slowly.

“You weren’t home,” Sabre starts. Head bowed, eyes to the ground. He never was good at looking people in the eye. “It was worse than usual. Probably because I actually  _ knew  _ him, unlike the rest. It was so clear. I saw every individual detail."

“Sabre,” Jay says again, detaching himself from Noelani’s arms, now stock-still. “What the  _ fuck _ —”

“It kept replaying, too, like it really wanted to make sure I knew what I was seeing. I couldn’t even stand up. I just remember going back to my room, before you got home, and then I woke up the next morning. Everything else is just a blur. I don’t remember if I went to sleep or if I blacked out or what happened, just…”

“Just what?” Noelani murmurs.

“The thoughts came back, that I should tell someone. And I wanted to, but—”

“But you got up, and I told you that they found his car outside the cafe, all the blood,” Jay interrupts. “And then you barely talked to me for three fucking days.”

Hadn’t Jay even said something of the sort to him, at one point? That sometime in March Sabre seemed even more despondent than usual?

And suddenly, now it makes sense as to why.

“He’s dead because of me,” Sabre says. He’s never sounded more certain of anything.

“That’s not true.”

“If I had told someone—”

“You said to me once that you had no way of stopping it,” Jay insists. “That once you saw it, that was it. Game over.”

“We could’ve tried.”

“And  _ what _ ?” Jay fires back. “Failed? Or gotten somebody else killed because we tried to intervene? How do you know it wouldn’t have been worse?”

He takes Sabre by the shoulders, as if shaking some sense into him will change anything. Noelani looks back at him, unshed tears shining in her eyes. There’s something in him struggling with the information, of how Sabre lived with every gruesome, intimate detail of it without anyone knowing.

And all the while, Nic was right under their noses anyway.

Noelani shakes her head, silently. It’s unspoken. It may have been time to share secrets, but this one isn’t leaving the room.

Is Jay right? Would they have only made it worse, in the long run? They could have failed, too, but at least with that Nic would just be  _ dead  _ instead of a mangled, deranged version of his former self. Worse, there’s no way to tell. They won’t ever know, because the knowledge practically destroyed Sabre and sharing it now will destroy everyone.

Jay is still holding onto him, tightly, a stark reverse of what was happening just a few minutes ago. Sabre pulls away, rocking up uneasily to his feet. He’s doing what they all do best.

He’s running.

“Sabre, hold on,” Jay tries, but he’s past Tarquin and climbing out the window before he can so much as blink, or offer a hand in stopping him. Jay throws a leg over the windowsill, calling out after him, and only stops when Noelani puts a hand on his arm.

Sabre won’t go far. He never does. He’s most likely going to lock himself in his room back like he did in March, silent until the worst of it goes away.

Jay rubs at his temples, eyes fixated on the walkway all the way to their own door. He looks up, too, like whatever is up above them is going to fix any of this. If the sky could fix his problems, Tarquin would have committed to staying up there a very long time ago.

He sighs, almost irritably, but his eyes are furrowed in a distinctly not very Jay-like expression. One of many tonight, apparently.

“What?” he asks. Jay’s eyes don’t move from wherever they’ve fixated. The darkness of the sky has overtaken his eyes.

The longer he looks, the darker it becomes. Darker than usual.

He gets no answer, so he shoulders them both aside to get some space in the window. The sky  _ itself  _ looks darker, like ink proper, not the ocean-deep blue-black that it usually is. There are no clouds. No stars.

“It looks… different?” Jay questions, clearly confused. And he’s right. There’s a space just above the very top of the downtown buildings where the sky appears to be shimmering, an almost unnoticeable difference. A ripple, barely there.

A shield clear as glass, a wall where there shouldn’t be one.

“What the hell is that?” Noelani asks. She’s noticed it, too. The more he looks the more he sees, like part of the sky has come alive. It’s not the sky, though. That’s what he knows, without reservation. It’s what comes before it.

What they’ve put up…

Well, Ria  _ did  _ say it was going to happen.

Tarquin just didn’t imagine it would happen like this.


	8. The Way To The Heart

**Thursday, June 29th.  
** **Fourteen days after.**

“Well,” Soran says, obviously unimpressed. “That’s a problem.”

_ Well,  _ Emmi thinks.  _ No fucking shit. _

If she was guessing how her night was going to go, this would have been near the bottom of her list, even despite Ria having told them what was likely going to happen. Even Ria, to her credit, had looked surprised at the speed of it all.

It had started with the messages, because nothing had changed otherwise. There was no odd feeling in the air, no grand differences. The first of them to notice what was going on had started sending the messages out, and all across the building they had been woken.

Emmi had been awake, as she usually was these days, Arwen far on the opposite side of the bed. She hadn’t woken her up, initially, not until she had looked out the window and come face to face with what everyone was telling her was already there. Even then it had been an internal struggle. Arwen was never meant to deal with any of this. The worst part was, this wasn’t even Emmi’s fault. Everything else that could come down on her, maybe, but certainly not this…

And now it was.

Waking her up was more avoidance than anything else. She had taken her by the shoulder, gently, and told her to check her phone. And then she left. There was no one else awake to stop her just yet, only Nic, who had been sitting in the living room’s wide window like a goddamn gargoyle, silent, eyes turned up to the sky. For once since he came back he hadn’t even given her some weird look or other.

She wasn’t about to stick around and wait for one either. Going across the hall was the proper decision. All three of them were predictably awake, the news was on blaring frantic headlines about how properly stuck they all were in this damn city, and Ria had been on the fire escape, eyes otherwise blank except for the fear.

Emmi’s never been stuck somewhere before. She’s cut it close, a few times, but so long as she had her wits about her she could get out of just about anything.

This wasn’t up to her, though. This was outside intervention, more powerful than any of them. Something they couldn’t fight, if it was even worth it to.

At least she hadn’t been completely blind-sided, though she felt it now, listening to Soran complain about his foiled plans. Icarus kept looking at her as if she was about to snap, and his assumption wasn’t far off. She felt like a rubber band, stretched too thin, ready to crack back on the first person that tried to move her more.

“We should go see it,” Icarus tries, but Soran had already beaten him to it, keys dangling from one hand. They wait a moment, until Ria skitters after them out the door.

Emmi doesn’t want to go. She’s never been one to look in the face at things that have the ability to stop her. It makes her feel small, weak, all of the things she wants as far away as possible.

Icarus is staring at her from the hall, though, patiently watching when he usually has no patience at all. So she goes, pajamas and all, and gets in the car.

She still has control, but most of this feels like it’s against her will, anyway.

Somehow, one of the worst parts of it all is that Ria won’t breathe a word. Ria, who knew about the likelihood of all of this and kept it to herself. Emmi meant what she said about her not being a bad person.

But that doesn’t mean she didn’t make a metric fuckton of bad decisions. Emmi would know. She’s done the same amount, you see.

The second worst part, if she had to pinpoint it, is how scared everyone looks. Not in the car, necessarily, but the streets that are now worryingly flooded with people who aren’t thinking to look before they cross the road. It’s all fine and dandy, staying somewhere, until suddenly you don’t have the option. Most of the people here would gladly have been here their entire lives, but now that it’s set in stone… they don’t like it.

The closer they get to the edge of the city the more people there are. This place has never seen so many people out in the middle of the night like this before, frantic, scrambling to hold onto their loved ones as if the sky is already falling.

Little do they know.

The cars are backed up two blocks from the edge of the shield, and Emmi gets out before Soran’s even parked the car. Ria scrambles across the seat after, foregoing her own door. At least she’s still inhuman in some respects. How that’s comforting is beyond Emmi at this point.

It doesn’t even make sense that this many people are clamoring around the edge of the shield, as if their human nature alone will be enough to make it fall. It’s far too easy to pick out the humans from the supernaturals in a crowd like this, even if they blend in perfectly well. All you have to do is zero in on the ones who look as if they’re keeping their shit together even just a bit better.

There are dozens of them around her, thousands in this crowd alone. It’s a good thing Ria went for a hat again, contacts in. Someone would pick her out and stare for too long otherwise.

Emmi shoulders her way through the last few meters of people up to the edge of the shield. She can see it clear as day, now, as if made a glass. Even focused so intently on that it’s impossible to miss how tightly Ria’s fingers entangle in the back of her shirt, as if she’s afraid of being lost in the crowd.

There’s a new worst part to all of this, and it’s the fact that Emmi could never in a million years ask her to let go.

She pushes past the last person in her way, and there’s nowhere else to go. The shield is inches in front of her, stretching as far as she can see in every direction, lined with people. Now that she can see, though, there are people on the other side, too. Two groups of people separated by one thin divide, no entrance or escape.

“Should I touch it?” she asks. Ria sidles up under her arm, reaching out until her palm is flat up against the shield. Nothing happens except for a slight ripple, spreading outwards everywhere her skin touches before it’s gone again.

This itself is nothing that’s going to hurt them, not outright. It’s what’s going to happen now that they’re stuck inside here, unable to run.

That was exactly the intention.

She knows Soran is coming if only because of the increased volume of complaints around her as he no doubt forces his way in, and a second later he appears at her side, dragging Icarus behind him. He, without so much as considering a bad option by the looks of it, leans forward to rap his knuckles against the shield.

She should have known, considering he doesn’t care if something hurts him or not. If only he looked less like he was casually knocking on someone’s door, just waiting to be invited in.

“Well,” he says with a hum. “That is  _ definitely  _ a problem.”

What isn’t, really? Especially these days. Emmi is beginning to lose track of the amount of problems they have circling around. Somehow, Trojan ended up being the lucky one. All he has to deal with is a possible prison sentence.

And yes, that’s better, thank you very much.

“There goes the plan,” Icarus mutters. She had nearly forgotten about their convoluted, nonsense plan to find something that, knowing their luck, doesn’t even actually exist.

She’ll admit, though, that she’d take that option right now over being stuck here.

“I can get us out,” Ria says. Her voice is louder than ever before, if only to be heard over the deafening sounds of the crowd around them.

“I thought you said —”

“That’s one of the only things I know how to do, confidently. I can create a rift in the shield. Not for very long, and it won’t be big but… enough to let us slip out.”

Yet another little thing left in the dark that they didn’t know about. They’ll never stop discovering things at this rate.

“Rent a car on the other side,” Soran says. “We can make it.”

“And if she doesn’t get what she wants, you’re going to be racing her for it,” Emmi points out. Muelara, whoever she is, isn’t going to wait long to go after it. They may be evenly matched in terms of any sort of knowledge about its location, but one half of this equation is more desperate for it, and it’s certainly not them.

Soran shrugs, nonchalant. “That’s fine. I’m pretty fast.”

No one looks happy about it. Emmi certainly isn’t.

But it’s not her, and at the end of the day, that’s always been her first priority. Her, and only her.

That’s how she’s survived, and that’s not about to change now.

—

The group meeting Myra calls in the middle of the night is rag-tag, at best.

There are noticeable holes. Trojan, for one, but at least that is sort of amusing. Percy, who’s sleeping in a drug-induced haze. Sabre doesn’t show, which is unsurprising, but even more-so is Jay’s total silence when asked for an explanation. No Kidava, either, but she was never going to care enough to talk to them about anything of such a magnitude.

Topher tries to fill it by dragging Damas in from across the street, and fails, ultimately thwarted by a set of worried parents, and his other two little elemental  _ friends  _ don’t so much as pick up the phone.

Most of them know some of the details regarding this plot, but not enough. Still, it’s enough to send Ria cowering under their accusatory gazes and Mel eventually settles down in front of her, a shield of its own. He hardly knows her, but he’s got an attachment.

Attachments, typically, are a large and painful bitch.

Speaking of attachments, Arwen is leaning into her arm, chin on her shoulder. Eyes tired, still, but wide awake. There aren’t enough surfaces in Myra’s apartment to contain them all, and the floor is already starting to make her legs ache.

Emmi wishes she could pay attention. Even now, it’s not in her nature. So many of them are talking about what they can do, as if there’s an option at all. The whole while she expects Soran to pop in with some sudden wisdom, words pulled out from deep inside him. His expression is always indecipherable when she turns to look at him, a frigid air that had been icing away over the past few weeks. Dampened slightly, every time she looks, by Icarus swiftly moving to overlap their fingers on the counter’s edge. It’s like he’s on the defensive for once.

In face of who, she has yet to figure it out. Perhaps Emmi looking so much is bothering him, or both of them. It’s not like he can be scared of  _ Ria. _

Arwen is watching her, right about now, on her small frame tucked away behind Mel’s back, completely dwarfed. Outside of their first introduction Emmi hasn’t seen them in a room together. It’s an odd image. Arwen has wigs in the closet that are silver-white, too. Emmi never hopes to see her wear them again.

“Do you think we should have just killed her?” Arwen asks, a bare murmur into her skin.

It’s not coming from someone who enjoys being a murderer, who is comfortable with the feeling of their conscious being weighed down. In fact, it’s a very simple question.

Should they have?

“Who knows,” she mutters. She likes to think she does, despite the lie curling around her tongue. Murdering Ria may have only made the axe fall down sooner, harder, right over all of their necks.

It could have solved everything, too. They could have buried her like Trojan did Nic and never have dealt with the consequences.

She looks more like a child than the rest of them, though. They all have faces that refuse to betray their true age, but Ria’s is the opposite, truly telling of just how long she’s been awake in this world, and that’s to say not long enough. She’s just  _ small _ , like you could break her in two over your knee. Emmi could do it with only one arm.

“You look worried,” Arwen comments, staring up at her. Because she is, though that’s hardly something she can say aloud. Myra fixes both of them with a look, as if unamused by their staring or lack of general attention.

“We’ll be fine,” she says evenly. Someone will be, surely. There’s enough of them that at least one of them will get out mostly unscathed.

Not all of them, though. Emmi looks around the room, seeing nothing but familiar faces, and can’t help but wonder which ones are the battle fodder.

“I’m going to check on Percy,” she continues, bending down to kiss Arwen’s cheek. “You good here?”

“Course. I won’t be long.”

And then what? They crawl into bed and willfully pretend the world is still spinning around them, fine and dandy. If that’s what they can manage, it just might be the greatest lie she’s ever pulled off.

Myra gives her a dirty look when she stands, as if interrupting the proceedings is any more of a crime than killing someone. Soran is gone, behind her, but Icarus is still there. Whenever he left is anyone’s guess.

Emmi nearly escapes scotch free, is out the door and already re-igniting her ability to ignore the frantic conversation drifting into the hall, when Nic bolts out after her. Half the room watches him go.

He never moved so fast before. He was deliberate, careful, pre-planned to the point that it was painful for everyone around him despite how well it worked out in the end. He’s not this chaotic mess, a tornado whirling about and threatening to upheave everyone else’s halfway simple-existence.

If a tornado was covered in open wounds with maggots festering inside.

“What do you want?” she asks, carefully avoiding looking at him for too long as she begins to ascend the stairs. It makes her stomach roll.

“Why does everyone care so much about dying?”

“Very funny,” she says flatly. “ _ You’re  _ dead. How do you like it?”

He’s so close that she feels him shrug, sees the motion from the corner of her eye. It’s like he’s velcroed to her back. Strange, for how much he’s been running away recently. “It’s fine.”

“Fine,” she echoes. One of the most startling things in interacting with him now is the lack of apathy. He doesn’t care about anyone, anymore, doesn’t care that he’s dead. The entire building could collapse and kill them all, leaving him the only survivor, and Emmi doesn’t think he’d bat an eye.

She hadn’t been so privy to the expression on his face while he watched Percy get repeatedly smashed into the pavement, but he’s only got two now: uncaring, or overjoyed. If she had to guess, she’d pick the latter.

Emmi used to enjoy such things, too. She remembers what it feels like to watch someone go down, all the blood and the life seeping from their eyes.

But this is Nic, here, and it was  _ Percy.  _ It’s a situation her and Arwen would never find themselves in. Mel would dive in to take each hit for Meris like Nic would have, once upon a time. Hell, even Soran would gouge someone’s eyes out if they laid a hand on Icarus right now. The tension is running too thick.

“What are we going to do?”

“I,” she reminds him. “Am going to check on Percy.”

“Ah.” His voice has the audacity to be even slightly dejected, as if that’s disappointing to him.

“You don’t feel anything about that?”

“No,” he says, perplexed. “Should I?”

“I think you should do a lot of things.”

“Oh, like talk less,” Nic produces. It seems like he’s been holding onto that thought for quite some time now. “Everyone always seems very disappointed when I talk. If I talked less—”

“Okay, Jason Voorhees, I never said you had to be a mute.”

“It’s an idea, though.” That it certainly is. Emmi pauses while he opens the apartment door with a flourish, as if he’s suddenly very gentlemanly all over again. It’s decidedly the most Nic thing she’s seen him do since he got back.

Her one win of the night comes in the form of the apartment being dark, still, and silent as a mouse. Percy’s never that quiet.

At least someone’s managed to get some rest throughout all of this. Maybe she should steal some of his meds.

“So…”

“What?”

Nic looks at her, restlessly shifting from foot to foot. His fingers are picking ceaselessly at the edge of the bandages just below his left hand, ragged nail trying to scrape them up. Trojan covered them in the first place, but this handiwork is someone else’s. Mal, if she had to guess. Percy doesn’t have the stomach for whatever’s underneath them.

He looks better in the dark. Less… dead. When the daylight hits him it shines light on every little thing wrong with him. At least now all she can see are the dark edges of the wound on his neck that someone hasn’t managed to come up, the cut across his forehead.

“Which one do you think killed you, do you reckon?” It’s an awful thing to wonder, but Nic is sort of the pinnacle of awful right now anyway. There’s no harm in asking.

“No clue. Don’t really remember any of it. Trojan doesn’t either.”

“Because he went all rage monster on you,” she reminds him, snatching at his arm when his fingers begin to tear up the first bandage. He’s ice cold. She hasn’t touched him whatsoever until now and it sends a little jolt through her.

“Accident, though.”

“Because that makes it so much better,” she mutters. He’s exposed the first cut on his wrist, blackened around the edges. “Have you ever considered trying to close those?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know, less Voorhees, more Frankenstein?” He gives her a perplexed look. She leaves him in the kitchen to retrieve the sewing kit Arwen keeps in their room, waving it at him upon her return. He pulls up more of the bandage with a sharp little tug, peering at the cut underneath like he wants to see inside of it.

Emmi has none of those same desires, not knowing what’s certainly living inside him. “Yes or no?” she asks. “Might make you look less evil.”

“Think that ship has sailed,” he says, but holds out his arm, giving her an expectant look. She sits down in the chair across from him, taking his arm into her lap. As long as she doesn't really think about it, this will all be fine. A rotting, borderline necrotic wound on the arm of someone she thought was dead and who actually  _ was  _ for a short time… it’s better if she dissociates from the get-go.

She already suspected as much, but he doesn’t even blink when the needle digs into his skin and pulls all the way through. The rest of him is already fucked, point blank. Why not give him a complete lack of feeling, too?

“You know, I don’t think you’re evil.”

“Well, it feels that way,” he replies. “My head is all sorts of fucked up. I feel things but I don’t really… care.”

“Pretty sure that means you’re a sociopath.”

“Aren’t that and evil just the same thing?”

In his case? Probably not. There are a lot of things to label him as - too many, in fact, and Emmi’s not sure they could pick just one. In her experience, she knows what evil looks like, and he doesn’t fit the bill. She’s done enough to know.

“When you do something evil enough to prove it, let me know.”

Nic raises an eyebrow, eyes still fixed on her dragging the needle through his arm, meeting less and less resistance each time.

“Or not,” she suggests. “Maybe don’t do that.”

“Right,” he says slowly. “Is this supposed to hurt?”

“Yep.”

He hums under his breath, and then, for good measure, twists his arm right as she sticks the needle in again, clearly a test. She smacks his hand. Neither are things that look to impact him at all.

This has made her no more comfortable, but at least it feels like an attempt at a connection. This is certainly the longest he’s sat still at the behest of someone else, and not once has he tried to kill her, or break her arm. He doesn’t even sound perturbed.

It could be a step in the right direction.

Percy’s shuffling footsteps in the hall give him away long before he appears, but Emmi keeps focused on the task at hand.

“I don’t even  _ want  _ to know what the fuck you’re doing,” he mumbles, making that evident when he walks by directly to their right when he had a million directions to go otherwise. He’s too tired to be truly alarmed, but the bit of it she sees in his eyes is enough. He slows, watching them.

“Shouldn’t you be asleep?” she asks, dragging the needle through again. She swears Percy flinches.

“Need more meds,” he answers, reaching for the cabinet.

“You know, if you take enough of those, you’re going to overdose,” Nic helpfully informs him.

“I can only hope,” Percy mutters, far too loud to be considered something they weren’t meant to hear. He shakes three out into his palm and swallows them dry, watching on as his throat works. “You know, Mal told me if you get any worse that I should just kill you. And now I’m beginning to wonder if I should.”

She shouldn’t have let him take any pills. Percy wouldn’t be saying things like this otherwise. He’s exhausted, swimming through the drugged stupor to keep the pain away.

And of course, predictably, Nic has no good reaction to that. “You could,” he says with a grin. “But you won’t. You like me too much.”

One step forward, several thousand back.

It’s only made worse because Percy looks like he's put through hell and back, even excusing Nic’s untimely presence. Half-asleep, still, drugged to the high heavens, hair flattened on one side and sticking up wildly on the other. It’s that sleep-rumpled quality that makes most people seem adorable but somehow brings him down several notches further.

Emmi finishes with the last of the thread, rummaging for the scissors to snip the end off. Nic’s fingers are twitching again on both hands - still for too long, once again. She made it further than she thought she would.

“We can do more tomorrow,” she offers. “Or I’ll get Mal to help. Feel okay?”

Nic gives a sharp, jerky nod, and his twitching fingers finally reach up and away. Percy freezes when two of them slip under the strap of his sling and pull it back up to the base of his neck. Up until that point it had been hanging on a precarious half an inch from the edge of his shoulder, ready to slip off at any given moment.

He drops his hand almost like it never even happened. It looks as if Percy’s stopped breathing.

“Okay?” she repeats, waiting for a legitimate response. Nic nods again - it’s no better than last time, but he tugs his arm out of her hands and takes off, so that’s the one she’s going to get.

Percy lets out a long, slow exhale, but still looks just as tense as before. “He’s still in there, isn’t he?”

She knew it. Some part of her always held onto it. Nic is still in there, buried beneath all of the troublesome layers Trojan created in his quest to bring him back. Unburying that… she's not even sure it's possible. Things that deep are meant to stay that way.

It dishes out a helping of hope, though, that he isn't too far gone. Definitely not evil, either.

Emmi knows what evil looks like, seen the many faces of it and her own, too.

At least someone may be worth saving in all of this.

-

“You too?” Arwen asks, rolling over into her side.

Emmi was asleep for a few minutes, here and there. Now she’s watching the sky beyond the curtains gradually lighten, minute by minute. Dawn shortly, and she’s hardly slept a wink.

Emmi reaches for her, lacing their fingers together. She doesn’t usually feel the need to search out comfort like this. It comes naturally, without thinking.

She needs it, now, the hand of someone she loves weighted against hers, fingers warm.

“What do you think is going to happen?”

“I don’t know,” she murmurs. “What about you?”

“I’m not really good at knowing things, so…”

It’s a dig. A small, casual one, but a dig nonetheless. Arwen has never been able to let go of the part of herself that always wants to know, a ceaseless mission so that she can always be on top of things. A tiring pursuit, she’s sure.

“You know what I am.”

“El Naddaha,” Arwen whispers into her shoulder. “It sounds pretty.”

“It’s not.”

“I know.”

“They wrote stories about me,” she says. “About the people I killed.”

“For good reason.”

She wouldn’t have done it otherwise, and Arwen knows it too. When people deserve to die it doesn’t matter so much anymore. Every single one of them that fell to her were only getting a taste of their own medicine forced down their throats. Murderers of the innocents, heartless thieves, men that had never faced any repercussions.

She was their punishment.

“No one ever found out, but then they started sending people my way,” she explains. “Trying to… stop me, I guess. They didn’t see any of the sense behind it.”

“But they didn’t get you.”

“Not at first.” She swallows. “But then they formed the Collection Agency on the west coast, and convinced some of them to travel halfway around the world to look into it. I was gone, by then, but they didn’t stop looking.”

Arwen finally seems to understand this is going somewhere she wasn’t expecting, propping herself up on her elbow as if getting a better look at Emmi’s face is going to help her put it together.

It’s already spilling out, though. She can’t very well stop here.

This situation has always deserved more than Emmi was willing to give it.

“It took them years,” she admits. “Years and years. Every time they got close I’d be gone before they could get a hold of me. I knew it was only a matter of time, but…”

“But they didn’t,” Arwen says. “Or else you’d be—”

“Dead,” she finishes. “Right. There were three of them. The two were older recruits. They tried to make the younger one do it, but you could just see it in his eyes. He wasn’t a murderer. Just in way too deep over his fucking head. So I took advantage of it. Got him and one of the others before the third even reacted, but he got my arm before I managed to kill him.”

“Jesus, Em,” Arwen breathes.

“The worst part is, they’re still trying,” she says. “They’re still looking. And one day they’re going to get me.”

“That’s not true.”

“It is,” she insists, trying to quell even some of the anger. “When we were out, that night, when Tarquin… fuck, there were  _ five  _ of them, Winnie, and I knew the second I saw them that it was for me. If nobody else had been there, I’d be dead right now.”

“Emmi.”

“It’s going to happen one day,” she continues, as if never almost interrupted in the first place. “One day, I’ll be gone. Me being here is putting everyone in the line of fire.”

“Emmi,” she repeats, more insistent. “Nothing is going to happen to you.”

“I appreciate the idealism, but—”

“But nothing. You don’t think we’re capable of protecting each other?”

“I’m not willing to risk the chance that we’re not. I,” she says slowly, “am not worth any of that.”

“You don’t get to decide that for me.”

“I shouldn’t even be here,” she snaps. “What do you not get about that? The second the five of them showed up, I should have been gone. They’re starting to pinpoint a location.”

Emmi never should have done this in the first place. Getting attached, settling down, waltzing around and playing house like it was ever going to  _ work… _

She knows what she should be doing. Running, hiding, compiling a list of every single one of the people coming after her so that she could get them before they got her. What the hell was she even doing, anymore? All she knew was that it couldn’t continue.

It hurt worse, too, because of how long she had stayed.

“I should be gone,” she repeats. “I think I should go.”

“Go  _ where _ ? You can’t even get out of the city.”

No, she can’t. Someone can, though. It’s the last thing she wants to do, really, but this city has already proved that it’s turning against her. If she can get out it doesn’t matter who with, where she has to go.

So long as she’s gone.

She gets up, swinging her legs out of the bed. Arwen’s hand falls away from her arm. “You’re being ridiculous,” she says. Emmi ignores that in favor of grabbing two of her shirts draped over the closet door handle. She doesn’t even have a suitcase, just a duffel bag shoved far back into the closet, not nearly large enough to hold all of the things she has now.

Things she never should have allowed herself to have.

It was never meant to be. Emmi didn’t know how to stay, really, and didn’t know if she could learn. Not even for Arwen.

“It makes no sense now that people always call me the dramatic one,” Arwen says. “The Collection Agency isn’t the same as it used to be.”

“If you think that, you’re even more delusional than I thought.” The Collection Agency is only a facade for something worse. There’s no collection whatsoever.

Just death.

“You have no idea how bad it can get,” Emmi continues. “You have no idea.”

“Don’t invalidate what I’ve been through just because you’ve been through worse.”

“I’m not” she snaps. “But you have  _ no idea _ and I’m not willing to let you find out because I’m too selfish to leave.”

“You’re being a coward,” Arwen says evenly. “There’s a difference.”

So she’s a coward, then. Fucking sue her for that. At least she won’t have to watch Arwen, or any of them for that matter, die because she won’t leave. She can live with any name associated to her so long as that doesn’t happen.

She upends practically the entire contents of a drawer into the bag, shoves two pairs of shoes alongside it. The basics can come later, easily purchasable things that she can hunt down once she has the time. Emmi has always been good at fleeing as fast as possible, a necessity of life that comes as easy as breathing.

“I love you,” Arwen says. “You know that. Is it no longer good enough?”

Emmi slings the bag over her shoulder, stuffed to the brim. Arwen doesn’t actually think she’s serious. If she did, she would be on her feet, yelling, and wouldn't let her leave the room. Certainly not the apartment altogether.

Emmi backs out the door without interference. “I love you too,” she says, and closes it behind her.

She doesn’t waste any time. For all she knows there are seconds between her leaving and Arwen deciding to come after her. She slams on the door across the hall repeatedly until someone opens it, and then nearly hits Ria dead center in the face on the next swing of her arm. She peeks out through the gap, appearing shorter than she already is, eyes very wide.

“When are you guys leaving?” Emmi asks, forcing the door open. Ria stares at the bag as she drops it, watches the chain swing until Emmi locks it behind her.

Hopefully Arwen really does think she’s gone, and not just hiding over here.

“Tonight,” Ria says. “So… so no one notices, hopefully.”

Isn’t that what she’s always wanted? To go where no one could find her, to disappear, to repeat history but finally  _ win _ ?

“Well, I’m coming,” she announces. Not to the surprise of Ria, certainly, who between the bag and Emmi’s face had already put it together. It’s as if she’s predictable. She runs. People follow. The cycle repeats over and over.

Here she goes again.


	9. The Rift

**Friday, June 30th.  
** **Fifteen days after.**

There was never a plan for four instead of three.

Three just seems… simpler, somehow, even though it’s only one less. That fourth being Emmi only amplifies that feeling. She’s always been a lot, since the day Ria met her, and she certainly wouldn't expect any less starting now

She still has yet to figure out if Soran is happy about it, or just desperately trying to remain neutral. Icarus certainly is. For whoever's sake, really, because she can't figure that out either. The difficulty with humans ts that Ria has literally no idea what to make of their emotions. Muelara taught them a lot, or tried, but not nearly enough about that.

Emotions are complicated. Point, blank, period. So complicated that it must take them years to figure out, much longer than Ria's even had her eyes open. She couldn't hope to figure it out in two weeks, and even with more time she's not sure she could

It's a very rapid discovery, however, that her ability, or rather inability, does not matter in the grand scheme of things. Emmi is coming, and won't take no for an answer. If someone's going to be upset about it, they'll just have to learn to live.

Ria stays quiet. It's what she's good at. The one thing she was taught above all else.

Be quiet, do as your told.

Just let it happen.

At this point she's just waiting for Noelani to show up. Emmi said something about dyeing her hair, and it seems like a good enough time to change it just before they're due to take off. As Emmi has already pointed out, subtlety will never be her strong suit, but it'll be something different, and that's precisely what Ria needs.

Until then, she slips out onto the fire escape in the afternoon sun and waits. The lone rickety chair holds her, as always. No Tarquin, this time. There aren't even many words. It's like they've seen what's going on and fled.

It takes her a while to realize Sabre is there. Up a floor, obviously, and some ways to the right, but cross-legged on the harsh metal floor. He's looking right over when she finally glances up.

She's not sure who goes to look away faster.

She's not sure how to describe it, but Sabre feels like someone that could understand her. In a strange twist, he seems just as  _ alienated _ as she does. With him, it looks like a willing pursuit. That's the way he likes it. Ria has been forced into that, for the most part, and gotten comfortable with it because it's what she's best at. There was never anything else for her to do.

"Is that your doing?"

Ria looks up again. Sabre is leaning skyward, eyes on the shield far above their heads. It's invisible, at this angle, only the far rounded edges visible. You can't even tell it's there when you look up.

It's not so much a specific  _ you _ as a generalized question.

He wasn't there for their poor attempt at a group conversation about all of this, she remembers suddenly. Sabre only knows whatever garbled version Jay told him.

At least, she imagines it was garbled.

"Yeah." She's forced to speak loud enough for him to hear, volumes above what she would have gone for normally. He doesn't even turn his gaze back to her. He's stuck on the sky, still, the same way she always seems to be.

"Do you know anything about what's going to happen?" she asks. If Sabre is someone that could get her, or already does, then she feels at least obligated to ask.

"I know... worse things than whatever this could be."

"But you don't even know what this is about."

"Don't need to," he says evenly. "I'll figure it out, one day. I'll see enough."

She thought of him as a planner, until now, someone who liked to have at least some semblance of control over situations before he leapt into them. Perhaps she's read him wrong.

"Our guardian, I guess you could call her," she says slowly. "She's doing something. I don't know what, or why... if I was with them, I'd know. It's not going to be good."

He nods, almost sagely, like he's seen this before. Muelara explained enough. Nothing like this has ever happened on earth.

"It's not magic, is it?" he asks, fingers itching on his folded knees as if he wants to reach up into the sky and touch it.

"No. Technological."

Another lesson. Supernatural beings have shields of their own, too. More fragile. Breakable, with the right talents. The one before them now is practically impenetrable to something outside of their own kind, and even Ria is barely strong enough to tear open a hole in it long enough for them to get out.

"You seem worried," Sabre comments.

"You do too." A guess, really. Ria doesn't have a clue what true worry looks like on someone's face. At this point she's just guessing and praying to the unreachable heavens that she's at least halfway right.

If anyone is worried, though, it's him. She's learning to pick out the details. A rigidness to his jaw, how it looks as if he's putting thought into each individual motion when he swallows, occasionally shaking himself like he's trying to do better. Whenever he does it, he never looks back at her.

He's doing it right now. Swallowing, letting his eyebrows furrow, working his jaw.

Sabre looks down at her. All of the details vanish.

He's good at hiding it, as long as you're not looking too closely.

He is looking right at her, though, when he goes completely still, as if frozen in time. Ria stares at him for so long, long enough to realize that he's focused somewhere far over her shoulder instead, eyes completely blank. One of his hands slips off his knee. His knuckles rap harshly off of the metal supports lying below him.

"Sabre," she says. Quieter, than before. He doesn't move. Doesn't even blink. Everything she had noticed before has ceased.

It's like she's watching him disappear. One wrong blink on her part and he'll vanish into dust in the second she can't see him.

Ria stands up. His whole body flinches and then sways, like the slowest of actions on her part was enough to startle him. The first stair creaks when she steps on it, thinking it perhaps a better idea to get closer to him. His fingers twitch for a moment, and then fall still.

Ria is two more steps up at a snail's pace when Jay inches the sliding door open behind up, only enough room for him to slip out and nothing more.

He looks at her. Holds out a hand.

It looks like he means for her to stop, so she does.

"Sabre," Jay says carefully. "Buddy."

Oddly enough, she's not scared. Jay doesn't look scared, either. Just cautious. There's no response, but Jay hovers behind him for several more seconds until he circles around him, finally crouching down with at least a foot of space between them. Sabre flinches again, as if he's recognizing the presence of someone else near him but unable to focus on it.

It feels like forever until Jay reaches forward to clasp his shoulders, fingers white-knuckled as if he's squeezing as hard as he can manage. Sabre's entire body finally jolts, bigger than anything before, but what's most relieving are the few rapid blinks he produces as the life floods back into his eyes.

"Hey, man." Jay smiles, ten times brighter than any sun. "You good? Back with me?"

Ria feels, once again, like she doesn't exist, but it's not a bad thing in this moment. He looks at Jay for too long before he seems to remember her there. Looks at her, then. Back to Jay immediately after.

"Just tell me it wasn't any of us," Jay offers. Smile just as bright, but slightly more nervous.

Sabre shakes his head, a minuscule movement, but Jay relaxes. She does, too, an almost unbidden action.

She's beginning to put the pieces together. The explanation she got was a poor one that boiled down to Sabre seeing death in its simplest form before it actually happened. He looks halfway back to normal already, but judging by the shake of his hands as he squeezes his fingers together and lets go, it's not the truth.

"Alright, we're going back in," Jay announces. His hands are still tight on Sabre's shoulders, but he pulls him gently to his feet. "Don't want you falling off the fucking balcony."

It looks like he could, too. Sabre's every movement until now has looked precise, carefully thought out, and now Jay steers him back into the apartment with both hands, adamantly refusing to let go. And that wasn't even one of  _ them _ ? This is a stranger, he saw, or virtually one, and yet his whole body turned against the vision like it was the worst possible thing to see.

"Sorry, Ria," Jay says. "Thank you for overseeing. Officially off-duty now."

She nods, dumbly. Sabre glances at her before Jay shuts the door behind him, no words formed on his lips but something apologetic in his eyes.

As if Ria hasn't allowed far worse to happen already.

She stands there for quite some time, after, a stupidly long amount of time. It's like more was meant to happen, like she needs an explanation or a bigger impact. If that's not the case, this moment floats away forever. Soon she won't have time to remember it.

But this is what Sabre lives with. Hundreds of deaths, even thousands, all trapped in his own brain, day in and day out.

There’s no more needed than what he already exists alongside.

Sabre is already seeing awful things, and it’s hard to keep her mind from wandering. Is this a random occurrence, just another human meeting their end, or is it her fault? Is it happening because she let the axe hang for too long?

There’s no telling. Only leaving to find something she’s never seen, to do something she never thought she would do, all in the name of hoping she can stop it.

Even if it’s not possible. Even if Ria knows the truth, too.

She departs, then, with the knowledge that Sabre has yet to see any of them, and the dread that he likely will one day.

—

The sun is still bright when Noelani comes to retrieve.

She likes Noelani. Or thinks she does, anyway. She talks a lot. Not as much as some people, but just enough, and has no difficulty leaving long pauses in-between each though for Ria to speak up, if she so chooses. And she’s good at picking up when Ria doesn’t speak, too.

Another maybe-friend would be good, if she wasn’t leaving.

There’s something rising anew in her, a different feeling than she’s ever felt before. Something about hypocrisy. She never chastised Tarquin for almost leaving without telling anyone, but she thought maybe she should, and now she’s doing the exact same thing. It doesn’t matter if it was her idea, if someone else could pipe in and announce it. Noelani is going to be friendly, dye her hair, help her out, and then Ria is going to take off without breathing a word about it.

It’s very Ria-like, in a world of things that aren’t.

“I can’t wait for this,” Noelani says excitedly. “It’s going to look amazing.”

She’s currently doing unspeakable things to Ria’s head, all of which she can’t see because Noelani plopped her dead center in the middle of their dining room, far out of sight from any mirror. There’s the crinkle of tin-foil. An alarming wisp of bright blue as a single strand of hair falls in front of her face before Noelani scoops it back up.

“Did you not like the white?” she asks, finally. It was bound to come up eventually.

She’s given a long, predictable minute. How Noelani works, she’s confirmed. All in all it’s enough time for Ria to collect her thoughts and come up with an appropriate answer.

“It’s fine,” she answers finally. It doesn’t sit within her as a total lie. “I just don’t know anything else.”

Perhaps blue is one of the more riskier colors, and certainly not one that’s going to help her blend in any, but it’s a  _ choice _ , and more importantly it’s completely her own.

Subtle or not, anyone from before would have difficulty recognizing her now. So long as they didn’t really look, maybe they wouldn’t even see her.

They never did before.

The actual act doesn’t take very long - she doesn’t have much hair to begin with, even if Noelani painstakingly combs through it all, unwilling to miss any one bit. After the fact she just has to sit here for quite some time, and sit here while Noelani flutters around her, cleaning up. The remote is within distance, and while it would be a welcome distraction, Ria knows exactly what she’s going to see. More of the same. The panic, the reporters, the shield. No real explanation for any of it.

Tonight they’re going to leave that all behind, at least for a while. It’ll be a relief to get away from all of it, even if it means coming back eventually.

They have to come back. That’s not so much a choice as a certainty.

Ria is relieved when Noelani finally seems satisfied with her handiwork, turning her towards the sink to wash it out. She watches frothy shampoo and streams of blue round the drain over and over again, water dripping warm from the sides of her face until her eyes are faintly blurry.

Noelani pulls her away, turning her from the mirror. She stays still even if her only wish is to turn around and see while Noelani scrubs a towel over her head, until she’s certain every individual strand is poking out at a different angle. It won’t do any good to look like that.

The look on Noelani’s face is more and more reassuring, however, a small smile that gradually spreads as she runs her fingers through the very ends of it, flattening it back to a state of normalcy.

“Told you so,” she says, still with that smile. “Look.”

Her chest is unusually tight when she turns to face the mirror, eyes squinted almost like she doesn’t  _ want  _ to see. The bathroom lights are almost bright enough to blame it on that.

The hair is much the same, though. Just as bright, fresh and vibrant, unlike anything she’s seen. It’s less green than Noelani’s and more outright cobalt, a color that doesn’t belong on anyone’s head but somehow looks… right, on hers. Until a few days ago, Ria had never let herself imagine looking any different. Emmi saying it had placed a new perspective right in front of her.

Has she ever properly cried before, or is the stinging sensation in her eyes something else entirely?

Whatever it is, it’s probably not good for her contacts.

“I’ll resist the urge to hug you,” Noelani says. “But it looks really good.”

“Thank-you,” she murmurs, for both things. A hug might make all of this worse. She owes Noelani that, at least, but she’s not quite there yet.

One day she could be.

“Course,” Noelani says. “Now look at me, again, let me finish drying it so we can show everyone.”

For once in her life, that doesn’t sound like such a bad thing.

—

It’s one final check-up.

That’s all it is, Ria thinks. Nothing more.

Noelani coerced her into showing just about everyone in the building over the better part of an hour to varying, although mostly terribly excited reactions. It hadn’t been her thing, getting paraded around like that, but it was enough to take her mind off of tonight.

It was almost that time. She was running out of it to hurry upstairs, although at least this time she actually knocks. Knocking is an appropriate thing to do, she’s learned.

“Come in!”

It’s unlocked, unsurprisingly. For the fact of him keeping secrets, Tarquin seems to have some sort of problem with locking his door. He’s on the couch, flat on his back, eyes fixed on a point in the ceiling that she can’t figure out.

She’s prepared to sit on the floor, shoved in the narrow space between the end of the couch and the coffee table. Tarquin pulls his legs up, knees pointed to the ceiling, and she sits down in the place he’s left instead, suddenly compelled. She would have rather chosen the floor, but it’s not an option now.

He glances at her through the space between his knees. “Nice hair.”

It’s a simple comment. Genuine. Most things sound that way in his voice. It’s no wonder he has a talent for lying until it all crumbles to the ground right in front of him.

“Do you need something?” he asks.

“No.”

Ria doesn’t quite know why she’s here. He wasn’t around earlier, hadn’t responded to any of Noelani’s messages or any of their efforts to show him before now. A little part of her had begun to wonder if something was wrong, or if he had finally left. He wouldn’t really listen to her forever, would he?

Something’s on his mind. He’s silent, leagues beyond the usual, fingers laced over his stomach and twitching. It reminds her of Sabre.

She doesn’t like it one bit.

“I’m just… thinking about a lot,” he says eventually. All Ria has to do is sit here, no work required. All of the words come spilling out. “About all of this shit, and what’s going to happen, and what we’re going to have to do.”

“You don’t have to do anything.”

“Now, maybe, but that won’t last forever. Even if something around us goes up in flames that means we get thrown into the deep end too.”

Perhaps it’s the delusion, but Ria was trying to avoid thinking that way. She thought Tarquin was the same type of person. If she gets whatever’s out in the desert, everything can stay away from them. Things can fall apart, far far away from all of them.

“I just can’t help but think that it’s just going the same way for me,” he murmurs.

“What do you mean?”

“Everything I always want to avoid. The destruction, the death, the ending of it all.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault,” he says, sounding mighty confident when she can still hear the gunshot echoing in the back of her head when things get too quiet around her. It’s all her fault. Even him, adding two more dead bodies to the list of surely hundreds - that’s on her. If what Tarquin says is true, then she’ll take the fall for it.

And she’ll deserve it, too.

She’s beginning to re-think making him stay. Tarquin could have gotten out while he still had the chance, the  _ only  _ real chance for any of them.

There’s only one way he’s getting out now.

She looked across at him. His knees were blocking most of the view, but she could finally see all of the stark differences. He looked completely unlike himself, or at least the version she had come to know. There was an odd fragility that she thinks looked more apt on her than anyone else clinging stubbornly to his face.

“I just don’t wanna do this anymore,” he whispers. It wasn’t easy to tell from here, but it almost looked like he was going to cry. He opens his mouth, more words clearly held on his tongue, but only the quietest of noises slip out before he presses his hand over his mouth, muffling it.

Ria is not equipped to deal with many things, but this may be at the very top of the list. The fierce ache in her chest was empathy in its purest form.

She had never really understood it until now. She hadn’t needed to.

It felt like more than a risk even reaching for him - it was outright danger. She didn’t know what she was doing. If someone tried this with her surely she’d sprint headlong in the opposite direction. There was a reason Noelani didn’t reach in to hug her earlier.

Her hand brushes his knee, just barely, and somehow it’s enough. He takes a deep, shuddering breath, watery eyes flickering to her at the end of the couch as if he forgot she was there. She hasn’t spoken in so long it’s a possibility.

She didn’t move her hand a single inch. It was silent, for a long time. She could hear the gunshots again.

She needed to quiet them. “How quickly can you pack a bag?”

—

“Oh, don’t tell me he’s coming now, too,” Emmi said flatly.

Ria only haz the door open four or five inches when Emmi’s voice rings out into the hall, an accusatory glare on her, first, and then Tarquin immediately after.

Or maybe at the two bags he’s got hanging off his shoulder. The larger of the two, by far, is only so obvious because he’s bringing the staff. Most of his scattered belongings have stayed behind, but that was never an option.

It was a garbled explanation at best that boiled down to the fact that he didn’t have to stay with him, not once she got them out, but he hadn’t given her a straight-forward answer either away.

Ria thinks she knows it, anyhow.

“Gonna have to rent a bigger fucking car,” Soran mutters under his breath. “Can we go now? Before someone chickens out?”

She didn’t expect anyone to care, but maybe Tarquin did, judging by the uneasy look on his face. His eyes are still slightly red.

It’ll be good to get that look on his face whether or not he leaves them.

“I’m so excited,” Emmi says, not sounding it the least bit. “Remember the last time we all went for a walk? That was fun.”

“I technically wasn’t there,” Tarquin reminds her.

“Bullshit, you weren’t there. I— is that what I think it is?”

Ria misses the initial exchange of Soran yanking something out of Icarus’ hands, to a series of muffled complaints, but sees it clear as day when he unzips his bag to shove it inside. A gun. It looks awfully familiar.

“You shouldn’t have kept that,” Tarquin says weakly. “Murder weapon, and all that.”

Soran looks up at him, or the both of them, and smiles. “Suicide weapon, actually.”

“He just doesn't like the idea of me being completely defenseless,” Icarus informs them, though there’s something oddly touched in his eyes, as if someone caring about his well-being is the nicest thing they’ve ever done.

Ria is beginning to think, having finally experienced it herself, that it just might be.

“You,” Soran emphasizes. “Are not  _ touching it. _ ”

“We’ll see about that,” Icarus answers. He is absolutely going to touch it at some point. “Let’s go.”

Tarquin lingers behind them in the hall while the door is thoroughly locked, clearly hesitant. He looks like a puzzle piece from a different box, one that wasn’t meant to fit.

He follows, anyway.

The plan for the immediate future is rather simple. They’re walking from the apartments to the middle of the Oakland Bay Bridge where the shield cuts through it. Less people, no legal foot-traffic, no cars going in and out. In Oakland they get on a bus, just in case, down to San Jose. Easier to lose the trail in case anyone sees them and begins to question it. Soran already has the car lined up down there.

Or at least he did.

The path from there isn’t even very long. About nine hours to wherever this Death Valley even is, reassuring as it sounds. One long, uneven shot.

It’s all working out so well currently that Ria can’t imagine it continues this way forever. Even Tarquin’s previous amounts of optimism are gone, no use to her now.

Nothing is forever, especially anything easy.

The walk will do good to clear her head, though. Hopefully it will do the same for all of them. Tarquin clearly isn’t the mood to get into the nitty-gritty of whatever his brain is going through, and Emmi has hardly spoken to any of them since she showed up this morning. There’s been a stew of anger only. Some of it floats away in the open air, but not enough.

It’ll take a while longer for that to happen.

“Do you really think we’ll find it?” Tarquin asks, readjusting a bag over his shoulder. She’s taking comfort in the fact that they’re armed.

A sickening thing to take comfort in, one she never would have weeks ago. Certainly not up there.

“We have to,” she murmurs. Is there another option? If they don’t find it, Muelara does, and then exactly what Tarquin is already imagining comes to fruition. The death and destruction, the end of everything he knows all over again.

If there’s anything she can do to stop it, she has to try. It feels too big a job for her, but she’s the only one who can help them.

They helped her. She has to repay the favor.

“I’ll try and stay optimistic,” Tarquin says, though he doesn’t sound too confident. The fact alone that he’s trying means more than he even knows.

That’s all that’s said between them for what feels like at least an hour walk. Down numerous streets, cutting through alleys, all the way to the edge of the bay. The streets feel like another planet compared to what she first experienced. There’s hardly anyone out, and the few people that are walk faster than normal, keep their head down to avoid eye contact.

For the first time, Ria doesn’t feel the need to hide herself. She looks different, now, and no one’s paying attention anyway.

There are a few abandoned cars at the beginning of the bridge, as if people fled and abandoned them when the shield first descended. She can see all the actions of panic - left open doors, bags spilling out of them, a set of dropped keys and a trampled wallet.

And no one’s willing to retrieve them, less they get too close.

The shield is smack dab in the middle of the bridge, shimmering up into the sky. A car lies, half on each side. Where the shield hit upon its growth it looks melted, almost, as if the metal was unable to withstand the initial force of it.

At least there’s no sign of a body.

“Well, now or never,” Emmi says, fixing her with an expectant look.

Right. This is her job. Everything else can be done by another set of hands, but not this. She steps forward. The tips of her fingers slide against the shield, further and further, until her palms are flattened against it, the edges shimmering.

She can feel them all watching her. It’s pressure unlike any other. How quickly their plan can utterly fail, if she can’t even open it.

She just focuses though, the way she was taught, and she feels it move beneath her hands before there’s even any obvious visual indication. It starts to pull apart between her hands, a few millimeters that stretches into a gap maybe just over a foot wide directly in front of her.

Ria forces it, but it finally sticks just shy of two feet. “As good as it’s going to get.”

“How do we know it’s not going to fry us?” Icarus asks. She can tell without looking that he’s fixated on the car stuck halfway through the shield, the warped edges at the top where it connects.

It’s not going to fry her, but she has no proof for anyone else.

Soran takes the bag off his arm, finally, and ducks under her arm to throw it through the gap. It hits the ground and rolls a few meters from the opposite side unscathed. After that he shoves his arm through without hesitation. She keeps waiting for something, for his arm to bubble and burn, but nothing happens, and he steps through to the other side without fanfare.

She feels the resistance when he steps through, brushing up against the side of the rift. All the parts of him directly through the gap are clear, unwavering, but when he stands back to his full height above her head she can see where the shield holds him back.

“Alright, she can’t hold it all night,” Soran says. “Is anyone else coming?”

Icarus eases under her arm and through the gap so quickly he nearly knocks her over, as if the thought of being stuck on this side is the worst one he could imagine. For him, it might be.

Emmi follows, leaving just Tarquin lingering behind her. His eyes are on the city behind them, the unusual quietness. Everyone is holed up, avoiding what’s happening just outside their front doors.

That won’t work forever.

“You don’t have to come,” she reminds him. Her arms are starting to shake a bit.

His eyes are still behind them. “I know,” he answers. Unfocused, still, when he follows the others in ducking underneath her arm to slip out of the rift like he had never considered otherwise.

Ria slides her foot forward, until it’s passed through to the other side, her arms still straining to stay flat. She feels every hair on the back of her neck stand up when the rift closes behind her, melting together once again as if never touched in the first place.

It is beautiful. She’s never seen one quite like this, but it is.

Even despite how awful it is.

Just to the other side of the bridge, into Oakland, and then they’re gone. All of the options for where she could have ended up, and somehow this was it?

There are worse options.

She follows the others down the bridge, all the way until it begins to slope back down to proper land. No one else has looked back for quite some time, but just before it disappears for good Ria can’t help herself.

The city is beautiful like this. Peaceful, even, in it’s safely contained state. If that’s all it could be -  _ safe _ , then maybe she could allow this.

But it’s wrong.

The twinkling lights, the cars few and far between, the distant silhouettes of people on the shoreline, so small. So insignificant. The birds trapped inside, circling frantically. A wavering, almost ghostly form on the bridge at the shield’s edge. A streak of white. Twin dots of electric blue.

She knows what she’s looking at.

What’s looking back at her.

“Ria! Come on!”

She listens. She has to. The bridge ends as her feet scrape backwards, unwilling to look away. It would be so much easier if it was a ghost, a figmention of her imagination.

“ _ Ria _ !”

It’s easy to run. To hide. It’s the only option, now, as her feet finally leave the bridge and hit solid ground. The others have already rounded a fence, one that will take them all out of view for good.

It’s too late. She was too late.

Just before she disappears, she thinks she sees Muelara wave after her.

**Author's Note:**

> And welcome to part two. Shorter chapters this time around, but a few more of them to compensate. Thanks for reading!


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